Amid the controversy that some expressions of Islam are stirring across the world, it's instructive to think back over one thousand years to the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and Asia during the Middle Ages.  Western Europe's emergence from the "Dark" Ages into the intellectual splendor of the Renaissance was encouraged and aided in part by the extensive learning, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical, it absorbed from the Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East.  Even as today the largely white West and the largely Islamic Middle East seem locked in interminable conflict in almost every way, neither side being openly willing to admit that the other may have learning or thinking that it might find useful, we long for a repeat of world history past.  Over a millennium ago, for a few golden decades, West and East, Europe, China, and Middle East interfaced in harmony, learning from each other, embracing each other, and working with each other for a greater good.  Setting religion aside, they strove to think the best of each other and proceeded accordingly. And the world was immeasurably better off.
     The God who created this amazing world and every person in it (consider Psalm 24:1) knows very well that we will never agree on absolutely everything.  He made all of us different, sometimes radically different from each other.  And that's good:  we grow best in a dynamic world.  To do so effectively, however, we need to love and appreciate this dynamism, and to try, however difficult it may be, to live and deal, indeed revel in, with its effects.  It's a beautifully colored world, a wonderfully woven tapestry of experience.
     We just have to find the most appropriate blend.