ISSUES OF FAITH: A new old idea: Living in tolerance
Published 1:30 am Friday, April 17, 2026
AS YOU ARE reading this, I will be in southern Spain for a long awaited and several-time-postponed trip. I will write a trip report in May.
For a long time, I have been fascinated with a period in Spanish history that ran from roughly 800 to 1200. During that time, even though under the political control of Arabic Muslims, people following Islam, Judaism and Christianity worked together respectfully and cooperatively. Academics call this period the “Convivencia.”
To give me more background on this almost unique time period, I read “The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain” by Maria Rosa Menocal, a professor at Yale University.
It’s a great book for those drawn to this sort of cultural history, and the writer doesn’t sugar coat other kinds of conflicts that erupted between city states like Cordoba and Toledo. But the conflicts were not about who believed what about God and how they worshiped. It was plain old politics and economics — who controlled what part of the spice trade or a strategic piece of geography.
The period of the “Convivencia” was a time of extraordinary flourishing of the arts and sciences.
As Menocal writes, they prospered within “… a culture rooted in an ethic of yes and no, so readily able to love and embrace the architecture or the poetry of political enemies or religious rivals, (and) so willing to read good books regardless of the library they came from.”
General tolerance for each other’s religious practices under the Islamic commitment to protect People of the Book (Jews and Christians) waned with the arrival of foreign conservative religious forces from the north and the south.
Crusaders of a type crossed the Pyrenees Mountains from the north and Islamic Moroccan Berbers crossed the nine miles of the Strait of Gibraltar. Neither groups were pleased with the fabric of tolerance they found among the people of Spain and employed a scorched-earth policy to right the wrongs they felt had corrupted the faith. Exquisite palaces and gardens were destroyed, and the most important libraries in the world were turned to ash.
Where am I going with this? Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are on the rise in the U.S. and religious terrorism has stepped up, too, between different sects around the world. Is there anything to learn from the Spanish “Convivencia” that can vaccinate us from extremism that threatens to kill the bit of tolerance we have left?
Part of the answer is in thanking Peninsula Daily News for including the weekly Faith Issues columns. Each of us is telling a story of faith from our traditions and backgrounds. Have you noticed we consistently overlap with what it means to do good and not just believe you have the only way of doing good?
Tolerance comes when we pay more attention to each other’s “orthopraxy” and not our own “orthodoxy.”
Is there anything we can do together to begin our own “Convivencia”? It will actually be pretty easy. The formula is from Micah 6:8: “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
Join me in trying?
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Don Corson is an Ordained Deacon in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) and the winemaker for a local winery. He also is the minister for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Forks. His email is ccwinemaker@gmail.com.
