Why a Bulletin devoted to Islam and its relationship to health and healing? From one perspective, it's about time. After all, Islam is arguably the fastest growing of the great world religions, both in sheer numbers and in geographic reach. Moreover, September 11, 2001, and its aftermath have lent a new urgency to efforts by non-Muslims to understand and respond to Islam. More than ever before, Islam has gained the attention of a public that is at once aware of how much it does not know, plagued by fears it senses are irrational, convicted by its own failures of hospitality, and now reaching out, albeit hesitantly, across a gap that it helped create.

Above all, Islam deserves attention in our health-faith-ethics arena because of its content: its distinctive approach to health and medicine, and its contributions to health and healthcare practice in our time. With its faith that God has made the cures of what ails us accessible to the inquiring human mind, Islam opened the door to habits of observation and reasoning that helped make scientific medicine possible. Yet it never lost sight of what today we call the whole person—nor forgot that both the causes and the effects of illness involve body, mind, soul, and indeed even the environment. Knowing that mental and physical health depend on moral and spiritual health, Islam has cultivated the balance that the spiritually grounded pursuit of virtue can provide.

In the contemporary American scene, African-American Muslims help us realize that Islam has a contribution to make to public health, illness prevention, and health promotion. Yet just as Islam supports attention to the health of the community in the broadest sense, its teachings can also form the life and practice of the individual healthcare professional.

Final Bulletin Issue
Even as we celebrate the rich gifts of Islam and Muslims to health and healing, we must own that there is a less than celebratory subtext in this Bulletin. This issue, number 25, is our last. The always-dreaded "circumstances beyond our control" have struck, as Laurence O'Connell's Centerline explains (p.13). These circumstances have brought the Bulletin's four-year run to an end. All of us at the Center, and especially my editorial colleagues and I, have appreciated the increasingly enthusiastic reception that the Bulletin has received over these years. We have sought, in ways that Martin Marty's Last Word (p. 15) elaborates, to add a distinctive perspective to conversations at those junctions where religion, health and medicine, ethics, and public policy converge. We wish our readers well and extend our heartfelt thanks for your interest and support.