MIRG

Memphis Inter-Religious Group

http://MemphisIRG.org

LINKS: Home Page About Us Events page Book List Some History

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Most people come here to look at the EVENTS LIST, Click Here.
Who are we and what is this about? See our About Us page by clicking HERE.

(Page revised 5/18/2012)

May 2012:
5/18 Last night was the Annual awards dinner by Diversity Memphis. Two of the honorees were people we have worked actively with, Dr. Manoj Jain and David Waters. Others who spoke whom we have worked with or talked about here in the past include Rabbi Micah Greenstein of Temple Israel and Father Nicholas Vieron of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, whose talks at Calvary last Lent are still available to listen to, Dr. Bashar Shala of the Memphis Islamic Center and Memphis Friendship Foundation, and mediator Jocie Wurzburg. Eunice and I got to sit with (among others) Janice Vanderhaar and Ed Wallin.

We were sorry to learn of a death a few days ago. Janice Vanderhaar sent this message:
----

Dr. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, a true prophetic woman of peace, passed on to eternal life on Sunday, May 13.

Please read the moving message below sent to me earlier today by a close friend of Ada Maria's.

It is hard to believe that Dr. Ada Maria passed this way less than two months ago to share with us her incredible message of Compassion and Solidarity at the Vanderhaar Symposium on March 15 in Memphis.

We sent the remarkable pictures taken that evening to her family. They capture her essence beautifully. Please scroll down the email to see photos.

We were indeed blessed by her powerful presence in our midst.

We send our prayers of deep sympathy to her beloved mother and all her deeply-grieving family.

May she rest in Eternal Love and Peace! Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz Presente!

----
Let us (or Janice) know if you want the photos.

April 2012:

4/23 There is a group in Damascus, Syria, working with Iraqi refugees. One thing they do is try to arrange college in the US for a few outstanding Iraqi refugee students. At the present time they have a candidate, a son of a physician working in a tuberculosis clinic in Baghdad whose family fled to Damascus after violence in their neighborhood at home. Christian Brothers University apparently will waive tuition if they can find pledges of support for room, board, incidentals. They have pledges of over half the funds needed so far. The interfaith aspect here of course is CBU's willingness to do this for a Muslim student; David Waters has indicated an interest in writing about the project. More info at http://memphisiraqistudentproject.weebly.com/about-isp.html   I'll provide the local contact information for anyone interested. (I'm at admin@memphisirg.org or 327-9735)

4/23 Memphis Islamic Center's Resident Scholar, Yasir Qadhi, was featured on PBS special program "Finding Your Roots" alongside Pastor Rick Warren and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl.   It's a nice interfaith program. The program aired on PBS, or WKNO in Memphis, on Sunday, April 15, 2012. However, the show is also available online at PBS' website at the following link:     http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/video/   Update: This link takes you to the most recent episode of this show, but you can scroll down and click on the episode "Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl, and Yasir Qadhi". They have another Yasir Qadhi episode, "The growth of Islam in America."   (We can possibly provide off-line copies if needed.)

The local Jewish History group recently circulated a review of "Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity (Kentucky Remembered: An Oral History Series)" by Nora Rose Moosnick. You'll probably enjoy the review on Amazon,
http://www.amazon.com/Arab-Jewish-Women-Kentucky-Accommodation/dp/0813136210

4/8 We aren't recruiting volunteers here, that happened elsewhere, but it's always fun to notice that on Easter, Temple Israel recruits volunteers to serve at the Soup Kitchen at First Presbyterian Church downtown, so that the usual Christian volunteers get the day with their families. Many of the chartities and activities in town are also manned by the Jews at Christmas.

4/7 Note that Edward Ordman's essay about interfaith activist Stanley Engelberg appeared in the Commercial Appeal on April 7, 2012.   http://ordman.net/Edward/Engelberg.html   "Helping Others was Stan's Life Mission"

March 2012:

3/31: The inaugural concert of the Balmoral Chamber Orchestar was a major success. We hope to see a lot more of them.

3/30: The big news among our friends recently was the death of Stanley Engelberg on March 21. I hope that an essay about him will appear in the On Faith page of the Commercial Appeal, probably April 7.
        Non-Jews will be amused to note that it wasn't until I was at least in high school, maybe later, that I realized that "Spring Cleaning" did not have a specific date on the national or Christian calendars. For the Jews it does: the day before Passover. The calendar put out by the local Hasidic Jewish group (Chabad) admonishes that in Memphis this must be completed by 11:49 am on Friday, April 6. This is derived, from centuries of discussion, from the biblical admonition that "you shall have no leaven throughout your habitations", hence all the corners of the house have to be cleaned to get rid of any breadcrumbs that may have accumulated. There are accompanying prayers and rituals. I was really quite startled when I discovered that the "spring cleaning" of the popular press was not this ritualized or specific.
        My events listings for the next week or so won't be as elaborate as recently, partly since the events of "Holy Week", Easter, and Passover, tend to be more specific to the specific religions and less inter-faith oriented. The number of joint programs involving multiple churches is simply too long to list. All the synagogues will have special prayers and some other programs on at least April 6-7-8 for Passover. So I'll include mainly a few concerts and other things that appeal to me.

3/19: In an e-mail I sent, I evidently was wrong about the reason that the lecture on March 15 by Dr. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz was moved from Christian Brothers University (which is normally very supportive of peace-related and interfaith-related events) to First Congregational Church (which is even more so.) Apparently the trigger issue was not her support of the ordination of women, but her preaching at the same-sex wedding ceremony of her nephew. The Commercial Appeal write-up of this is at
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/mar/02/seminar-speaker-canceled-by-02/ \
The very brief wedding sermon in question is linked to from her home page at http://users.drew.edu/aisasidi/
where you'll also find copies of some of her more substantive talks, if you either miised her talk on March 15 or (like me) heard it and would like more.

3/16: I have to note as of special interest the 2012 issue of the magazine of the American University in Beirut, Main Gate, which can be downloaded at http://staff.aub.edu.lb/~webmgate/MainGate-Winter2012.pdf (a big pdf, takes awhile to download.) There are excellent pieces such as "The Citizen and History Return to the Arab World", p. 28 and several others.
We also have a paper copy if you'd prefer to borrow that.

3/2: I note with mild distress that man of the Calvary Lenten lectures from earlier years no longer seem to be on the Calvary or iTunes websites (or maybe they are just hard to find.) I have saved a great many of the 2008 and 2010 lectures, and a selection of the 2009 lectures. Let me know if you would like any.

January 2012: We had a good meeting on January 27. One interesting feature is that we are now feeling confident enough with each other to start telling some of our groups' interior stories and conflicts, beginning to learn e.g. of similarities between the differences of opinion within the Muslim community to those within the Jewish community. We had especially good turnouts from Balmoral Presbyterian Church and from Pax Christi, the Roman Catholic Peace group.

There is a nice sequence of videos by Rabbis for Human Rights - North America, of individual rabbis speaking out against Islamophobia.
It can be found at http://www.youtube.com/rhrna
The main web page for Rabbis for Human Rights / North America is at http://www.rhr-na.org/

Another religious-group website of interest is the Pax Christi website, the Roman Catholic peace group: http://paxchristiusa.org/
Their local group has a web page of interest at http://www.paxchristimemphis.org/

Janice Vanderhaar has pointed out the international group http://www.religionsforpeace.org/ WHich has interesting reports recently on Catholic-Muslim cooperation in Nigeria.

Can anyone point out similar web sites, from clergy or laymen from other groups? Of course "30 mosques" is still there, a national blog out of New York with Memphis reports at http://30mosques.com/archive2010/2010/09/day-27-the-muslims-in-memphis-part-1/ about the Ordmans
and http://30mosques.com/archive2010/2010/09/outtakes-the-memphis-islamic-center-and-their-neighbors/ about Memphis Islamic Center and Heartsong Church. This has the nice interview with Danish Siddiqi, who has been invitred to speak at an evening program in the Calvary Lenten Lecture Series this spring, March 21, 2012.

Added late December 2011:

It wasn't a mass-participation thing, but several of our regulars were at the press conference Monday, December 19, concerning the suit against Delta Airlines over the refusal of a pilot to carry two local Imams. Rabbi Micah Greenstein, Rev Steve Montgomery, and Rev. Steve Stone, among others, spoke to the press on the importance of not discriminating. The Channel 5 report and video link are at http://www.wmctv.com/story/16351402/2011/12/19/religious-leaders-to-file-racial-profiling-lawsuit-monday#

My own comment, which I don't think anyone in the press reported, was that it was 100 years ago this month (December 1911) that my own grandfather, then a young Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, arrived in the US from Lithuania. He spoke no English. Five years later he was the founding Rabbi of a small synagogue in Peabody, Massachusetts, which is still there. 100 years ago many people still doubted that Jews could fit in as "normal" Americans (or, in Western Europe, as Europeans). About twenty years after that some politicians discovered that they could get donations and followers by preaching hatred of the Jews. The consequences of this, for the entire world, were rather traumatic. I don't think I need to say more.

December 2011:

Chanukah is a rather minor Jewish holiday -it doesn't make the Bible - and its contemporary importance probably stems from its proximity to Christmas. But there is a connection between the two. When the Maccabees revolted against King Antiochus Epiphenes, the descendent of one of Alexander the Great's generals then ruling the area, it was a rather bloody and nasty revolt. (Think terrorists. In my younger years my father compared the Maccabees to the Viet Cong.) The war is recounted in the books of the Maccabees (Old Testament Apocrypha). Even in those days, you couldn't run a good guerrilla war without foreign aid, and the Maccabees signed a mutual defense treaty with the Senate of the Republic of Rome; it is reprinted in Chapter 8, First Book of Maccabees. It was eventually under color of that treaty that Roman troops came to Israel, and that in turn led to the presence of Roman soldiers (and a priestly class allied to them) in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. I have this story in slightly more detail at http://ordman.net/Edward/Chanukah.html

Interestingly, the best Advent sermon I ever heard I heard at Masjid As-Salaam, the mosque on Stratford Road. A visiting preacher, a few Decembers ago, preached on the birth of John the Baptist (who gets even more praise in the Koran than he does in the New Testament.) He commented - wouldn't all of you like your children to be as self-confident, as knowledgeable, as kind to their parents, as faithful to God, as John the Baptist? Well, then take a serious interest in your children's education. (Long riff on education.) And remember that John, like Jesus, was a very successful preacher of the story of the One God. In fact, John was remarkably good at it - after all, he was the one who had to baptize Jesus, not the other way around. So when your kids are being overwhelmed by toy advertisements and multiple Santa Claus-es, be prepared to sit down and talk about John and Jesus, those wonderful preachers of God, because the whole season is really about God.

October 2011:

It was hard not to be excited by the program October 4 at the Church of the Holy Communion, where a panel of Muslim speakers answere questions for a very eclectic audience, the session chaired by David Waters. A very good turnout by the Muslim community allowed ample opportunity for people to mix and talkj in the social hour following. Thanks, all! This was an event sponsored in part by "Faith in Memphis", http://faithinmemphis.com , the continually improving "religion" online presence of the Commercial Appeal. Thanks, David Waters!

October 2 was an interesting evening at Temple Israel - a live from New York video of Alan Dershowitz being iunterviewed by Eliot Spitzer. No one may heve been surprised by Dershowitz's support for a two-state solution in Israel / Palestine, but I was interested in the delicacy with which he atttempted to distinguish between the desires of the Israeli public, Primne Minister Netanyahu, and the actual behavior of the rather unwieldy Israeli coalition government.

Sept 2011 Notes:

09/30 There is a new flood in Pakistan. Collections for emergency relief are being made at all Memphis mosques.
Also, Muslim Social Services is opening a new second-hand shop on Mendenhall north of Summer Ave.

09/24 Congratulations on the recent Peace and Harmony Days where so many of our friends spoke and attended (speakers included Cantor John Kaplan of Temple Israel, Nabil Bayakly of Muslims in Memphis, Janice Vanderhaar of Pax Christi, as well as Hindu, Buddhist, and American Indian speakers...)

09/20 In the recent Kosher Barbeque Contest at the orthodox Jewish synagogue Anshei Sfard-Beth El Emeth, the team from the Memphis Islamic Center placed third in Kosher barbequed beef brisket! Perhaps more important, this got a very nice writeup by the national Jewish Press agency! The article is at
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/09/20/3089486/kosher-bbq-competition-spreading-among-jews-and-some-muslims-too
It was nice to have a dignificant number of Muslims visible and well accepted at this event. Once again, Memphis is helping show the rest of the country (and even the rest of the world) that people CAN enjoy being together and doing things together.

09/18 I just noticed a very nice essay in The Commercial Appeal, Wendi C. Thomas: Faith leaders recast Samaritan parable, at
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/sep/04/leaders-recast-samaritan-02/

09/14 The Fares Center at Tufts University, http://farescenter.tufts.edu , has a great many good lectures on the Middle East available on line.
e.g. Michele Dunne: Egypt: From Evolution to Revolution (April 13, 2011)
Salim Tamari: What Future for Jerusalem? (April 4, 2011)
Rami Khouri and Mohammed Younis: What they fear, what they seek: Understanding young Arabs who are reshaping their societies (February 22, 2011)
with many more upcoming.

09/14 The cooperation we have in Memphis continues to serve as a role model. If you missed the recent CBS news piece (with a lot of Dr. Bashar Shala of the Memphis Islamic Center and Rev Stone of Heartsong) it is at
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/08/earlyshow/main20103317.shtml?tag=mncol;lst;3
This has text of their interview as well as the video. (Thanks, Tanvir, for pointing this out.)

09/14 You might also enjoy an essay on religious eductaion in the Internet age by Rabbi Dr. Gil Perl, Dean of Margolin Hebrew Academy/Feinstone Yeshiva of the South in Memphis, Tenn.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/special_sections/education_careers/are_we_prepared_new_approaches_learning

June 11, 2011:
    It was very nice to see a an essay by Janice Vanderhaar in the Sunday Commercial Appeal "Souls, spirits in rhythm are essence of our community", at
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/jun/11/guest-commentary-souls-spirits-in-rhythm-are-of/
     Janice is of course chair of the Vanderhaar Symposium which honors her late husband, as well as a spokesman for the Catholic group Pax Christi and a past recipient of a major interfaith award from Muslims in Memphis. And in the essay she quotes Arnold Perl as chairman of the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority but doesn't mention that he's also a recent past president of Temple Israel.

      My wife Eunice and I had another chance to appreciate the interfaith richness of our city recently when on May 23 she was diagnosed with an Aorta Dissection, a major tear in the inner lining of the aorta which is frequently fatal. She received wonderful treatment at Germantown Methodist Hospital and is recovering well. I couldn't help but notice that the initial diagnosis was by the gastroenterologist Dr. Gary Wruble, who just may be the only gastroenterologist in the city ever to have been a student at a Torah College (loosely, Jewish Bible) in Jerusalem, and that her Cardiologist Dr. Bashar Shala is President of the Memphis Islamic Center and during Eunice's hospital stay was honored at a Diversity Memphis dinner, along with the pastor of Heartsong Church and several others. For those who like such things, the before-and-after pictures of the stent placement in the artery to get blood to her digestive tract is at
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150262441931187&set=a.424787671186.214150.548161186&type=1&theater
She's getting out of the house a little now, but still enjoys phone calls at 327-9735.

      During several days in the emergency room and intensive care, I managed to drop and break a computer, so my e-mail list has been restored from a backup a few months old. Any help people can give me in getting others on this list is appreciated. Please forward this e-mail to a few friends you think ought to be on the list, and e-mail me if you need to be removed from the list or get a forwarded (not original) copy and need to be added. Email admin@memphisirg.org

June 2, 2011:
Our openhouse 5/22 was very nice and veryinteresting and productive - Jewish, Christian, Sunni, Shia, MIFA representation.
Unfortunately, the next day Eunice Ordman had to enter Methodist Hospiatl Germantown, with serious problems. By now she is stable enough that we hope to be home in a few more days. Details at http://ordman.net/Eunice_sick.html

So updating the website and getting out e-mails has been postponed for awhile. I hope to be active again next week.

Notes of 5/21/2011:

If you haven't read it, look at
http://m.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/may/14/guest-commentary-shariah-bill-could-have-big-on/
an essay in the Commercial Appeal by a vice-president of LeBoheur Methodist Health Systems.

We continue to accumulate some intersting DVDs, CDs, etc. As some of you know, the Ordmans audit a lot of courses at the University oif Memphis and can recommend interesting ones (this is free if you are over 60). We also occasionally find time to look at the free courses some universities offer on the internet or at coures from "The Great Courses", a/k/a "The Teach Company". We have quite a few on hand we can lend, or if people are interested it might be fun to assemble a small goup to meet every week or two to watch and discuss one together (perhaps in the Fall?). Three recent acquisitions -

DVD, Beginnings of Judaism, 24 lectures (most of these courses are half-hour leactures), by Prof Isaiah Gafney, Hebrew University

DVD, The Holy Land Revealed, Prtof, Jodi Magness, (Archeologist), UNC-Chapel Hill, 36 Lectures, lots of video.

CD, Religions of the Axial Age, 24 lectures, Prof. Mark Muesse, Rhodes College.

If anyone indicates potential interest, I'll look around the shelves and add more to the stuff already listed her or on our Book list (link above.)

Notes of 4/17/2011:
We have DVDs available to lend of -
    The Vanderhaar Symposium lecture, March 6: - "Peacemakers, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim"
    Movie, "A Prince Among Slaves"
and others, see our "Book list" page.
    Edward and Eunice Ordman's talk to the Collierville Civitan Club, March 10 is now available online
     at http://vimeo.com/20981027
   The Calvary Lenten Lectures for 2011 are on-line:
    For example, Yasir Qadhi's talk, "The Most Beautiful Names of God", is at http://www.calvarymemphis.org/media/audio/podcasts/lps2011/20110413.mp3
Micah Greenstein's "Where Are You?" is at http://www.calvarymemphis.org/media/audio/podcasts/lps2011/20110404.mp3
and his "God is Watching and Waiting" is at http://www.calvarymemphis.org/media/audio/podcasts/lps2011/20110405.mp3
(on PC's, click on those to listen; right-click and "save target" to download to your own disk.)
For others, check the Calvary web site http://www.calvarymemphis.org/news/lentenseries.htm#Preachers

Notes of 3/11/2011:

Oh, my! I've talked of Memphis being an exciting place, but the more I learn the harder it is to keep up. On Wednesday March 16 I want to be in three places at once. David Waters, the religion specialist at the Commercial Appeal, is speaking at Balmoral Presbyterian Church on "Tough Issues in Memphis". Patrick Gray, a Religious Studies professor at Rhodes College, will be speaking at Beth Shalom Synagogue on "Tikkun Olam and the New Testament." This is part of Beth Shalom's Interfaith series: "Tikkun Olam" is Hebrew for "repairing the world." And on the U of Memphis Campus there will be a free showing of "A Prince Among Slaves," a movie about the life of a very literate West African Muslim prince who was captured and wound up spending most of his life as a slave in the US.   With events under Muslim, Jewish, and Christian auspices the same night, it may be hard for any of them to get the large and interfaith attendance all three events deserve. I remind everyone: the best way to get interfaith discussions going is to go listen to the other guy first, at his place.

While Memphis seems sometimes like a showplace for mutual recognition and respect, the rhetoric in the rest of the state and nation is not very good right now. Congressional hearings are being held by a congressman, Peter King, who seems to feel that we have too many mosques and 85% of the mosques are run by terrorists. The speeches are awful, the reminders of Joe McCarthy (and of anti-Jewish investigations in Europe a few generations ago) are great. And the Tennessee House and Senate have had bills introduced to prohibit practicing or advocating Sharia. I'm not clear exactly how far those bills go: I take it they would prohibit washing ones hands before eating (a great deal of the Sharia is about personal hygiene) and probably would prohibit saying that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary (since that is in the Koran). The Tennessee bills are patently unconstitutional, but the debates are clearly designed to promote hatred. I strongly urge people to write their legislators (state and federal) pointing out the absurdity of the proposed laws and hearings. Find Eunice Ordman's suggestions on letter writing and congressional/senate contact info at
http://ordman.net/Eunice/Political_Letter_Writing.html.
E-mail addresses of your state legislators are not on that page but are easy to find by putting in your 9-digit zip code at
http://withstringsattached.org/legislative-lookup/

David Waters has pointed out to me that the Commercial Appeal has an on-line listing of houses of worship, at http://faithworksmemphis.com/
Check to see that yours is there! Their coverage of churches and synagogues is pretty good, but they are weak on other religions - make sure you are listed under appropriate search terms and let them know if the listing doesn't come up.
(I can forward requests or comments to them if you prefer: admin@memphisirg.org )

3/05/2011: Events are moving thick and fast at the moment - sometimes one a day, sometimes two a day. I'm putting the things Eunice and I wish we could be at on the events list, but we can't get to all of them! We enjoy seeing as many of you as we do when we get to them. And of course we are giving a talk ourselves in Collierville on Thursday March 10. See the Events page!

Memphis Muslims in March month was off to a nice start at the lecture Saturday evening March 5; several more events are coming March 14-18. In the meantime, if you haven't visited Temple Israel, consider the events March 8 or March 20, and be aware of the dinner series coming up at Balmoral and the noon series (lunch optional) at Calvary.

As of Feb 19, David Waters and the Commercial Appeal have a new "Faith in Memphis" section and website! The website is at http://faithinmemphis.com/ and the introductory article from the paper is at
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/feb/19/introducing-new-forum-on-faith-be-a-part-of-it/

The website -does- have an events of interest listing, and David has asked me to ask all of you to help submit events to it. I'll try to handhold if needed as we get started. If it gets good enough that I don't have to work as hard at maintaining the list here, I will be delighted. So far, there isn't much overlap; look at his list as well as ours.

They are also building a website listing houses of worship, a searchable list. Once again, our help ius needed. It has the principal churches and synagogues but is very weak on mosques and probably on other religious groups. Please check that your place is on it and properly indexed (does it come up on appropriate search terms) and let the paper know if it needs to be added or edited. The list is at http://faithworksmemphis.com/ and it has a phone number to call to get things fixed.

Events are now back on the Events page with new things added regularly. I owe apologies to people who ask me to post things but with only a few days notice - I do sometimes have other things to do, and don't want to send e-mails too often. (Should I senmd more often? Let me know your opinion.)
We've also added a bunch of new things to the "Book List" page - links to videos of interest, including the lectures by Rabbi Marmor at Temple Israel, one of which was a wonderful talk about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the important Jewish philosopher and teacher who so often marchged arm-in-arm with Rev. Martin Luther King. -Also- the lectures from the Trinity Instute in New York which were shown and discussed Feb 18 and 19 at St. Mary's (Episcopal) Cathedral in Memphis, and some of Yasir Qadhi's talks at the Memphis Islamic Center.

One new feature: We will try to provide one-page printable events listings that you can print out to hand out or put on a bulletin board.
To find them CLICK HERE

Some nice reports about Memphis.

Feb 11. What a week - in the last few days there have been talks locally by Rigoberto Menchu Tum, the Guatamalan Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and talks about Frantz Fanon (the black psychiatrist born in Martinique who became an important leadert of the Algerian war for independence) and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish philosopher who often m,arched arm-in-arm with Rev. Martin Luther King. And a week earlier a lecture at U of M about the role of an Indonesian volcanic eruption in the spread of Islam in Indonesia and the expulsion of the Duitch colonial regime there. It's a complicated world, isn't it? Plenty more is coming, see the events page. Oh, the Commercial Appeal will soon be launching expanded coverage of religious events, both online and in the paper!

---

Memphis seems pretty nice just now. It is hard not to feel encouraged when the Memphis Jewish Federation mails out fund appeals for flood victims in Pakistan, The Memphis Muslims e-mail list has an appeal to bring in warm clothes to be distributed to the homeless at the Union Mission, and the Memphis Islamic Center is one of the sponsors of an event at Temple Israel. At one of our meetings Masjid As-Salaam and New Church Memphis discovered they were involved in the same program for providing food for the poor, and we discussed cooperation between Muslim Social Services and Jewish Family Services over issues like providing kosher/hallal food to hospital patients.

Following the troubles in New York over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," a Muslim writer and photographer from New York traveled around the US to see how Muslims were faring elsewhere. In Memphis, they were told, things are remarkably good. They quote Danish Siddiqi, the communications director of the Memphis Islamic Center, as saying “The Christians here are very welcoming of Muslims because they actually adhere to what they believe.” The New Yorkers go on to write about the relations between the Memphis Islamic Center and Heartsong Church at
http://30mosques.com/2010/09/outtakes-the-memphis-islamic-center-and-their-neighbors/
and about the interfaith activities of the Ordmans at
http://30mosques.com/2010/09/day-27-the-muslims-in-memphis-part-1/
It is nice to see Memphis get this recognition, and nice to feel so appreciated.

Please let me know of things that should be included.
edward@ordman.net

Stories of some of our past activities have been evicted to a HISTORY PAGE. >>