The board of the Maine Humanities Council does all those things you'd expect of a non-profit board - policymaking, financial planning, fundraising - but we always make sure that our quarterly meetings are, in the truest sense of the word, humanities experiences. Often this takes the form of a shared reading which, with the help of an experienced facilitator, we discuss after our evening meal.

This April, at our meeting in York, our readings were Elie Wiesel's "Dawn" and an essay by Laura Blumenfeld that had appeared in the New Yorker on March 4. She tells how she tracked down the family of the Palestinian gunman who had almost murdered her father a dozen years earlier. She wanted to know why, and her search takes her all the way to the would-be killer himself. He apologizes. She is befriended by his family. She leaves us with a haunting question: How can otherwise decent people do horrible things in the name of an abstraction?

Ruth Nadelhaft - who has led our Bangor community seminar for many years and has been active in our Literature & Medicine program for healthcare professionals - skillfully led our board through a discussion of Blumenfeld's quest, as well as of Wiesel's account of a Jewish terrorist who kills a British officer in Palestine. I don't pretend we had answers to the ethical and spiritual questions these two texts raised. But I am very glad we devoted our time to facing them. It helps us go on.

We are in the reading-and-discussion business. You won't find it in the financial section of your newspaper. No one can put a dollar value on what we do. But at no time I can remember has it seemed so important to keep people reading, thinking, talking with others, encouraging them to be skeptical of simple answers to complex questions.

This can take many shapes: a lively discussion in Brunswick of post-structuralist literary theory as applied to Mary Shelley's fiction, an equally lively discussion of Arnold Lobel's zany Fables in Skowhegan. But I am especially proud of the partial funding the Council granted, though its New Century Community Program, to the University of Southern Maine's recent conference "The Children of Abraham Downeast: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Search for a New Religious Pluralism in Maine."

Organized months before 9/11 by historian Abraham Peck, of USM's Academic Council for Post-Holocaust Christian and Jewish Studies - working with Bangor Theological Seminary, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the Muslim Council of Maine, the Maine Council of Churches, the Jewish Community Alliance, Seeds of Peace, and Portland West - the day-long, standing-room-only session wrestled with the question of whether this nation, and Maine in particular, can nurture a culture in which differing faiths live together in mutual respect and peace.

That question will take more than a day even to approach, but the conversation has begun. May it go on and on.

Dorothy Schwartz

Donors: Thank you

In addition to the names printed in the last issue, the following people contributed to the Council's Annual Fund 2001 (November I, 2000 to October 31, 2001). We are grateful for their support.

Charles Bassett Paul Beauparlant Wilma A. Bradford Gretchen S. & Stephen A. Drown Rena M. Gates Stanley R. Howe Rena M. Hultgren William & Weslie Janeway Mr. & Mrs. William Knowles Sheryl Little Linda Long Jean McManamy Luci Merin Alfred Padula Elizabeth Page J. R. Phillips & Dixie Stedman June & David Vail Yolanda Theunissen & Richard C. Veit Sharyn Viola Elizabeth Weiss & David Clement Alice N. Wellman Mr. & Mrs. Marshall K. Wood Anne Broderick Zill