FIVE THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT: Rev. Dean Taylor

1. As a cellist, he doesn’t have a favorite composer, but he is a big fan of Bach, Corelli, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev.

2. His favorite author is Michael Chabon.

3. He’s hard-pressed, he says, to name a favorite book of the Bible, but he particularly likes the story of Jonah. It shows, he says, “that God’s people are all people,” that there aren’t just “the chosen ones.”

4. For the past 10 years, he has been involved in a program that unites Christians, Muslims and Jews in learning more about each other’s faiths. “All of that really came out of 9/11,” he says. On the day of the terrorist attacks, he took out the Atlanta phone book and looked up the number of the city’s mosque. When he called to reach out to the members there, he says, “They were scared to death,” knowing the general public reaction to the events of that horrific day.

5. When someone mentions his Southern accent, the Georgia native laughs and says the way he talks is natural. However, he says with a straight face, he’s met a lot of people in Sarasota who do have accents.

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