Engagement in public issues involves both passionate commitment and critical distance. While it is not unusual for writers and academics to aspire to be 'neutral' towards the world they describe, in reality we are all involved to one degree or another in what we observe, since we cannot help but to be people of varied outlooks arising from particular situations.
 
In recognising that all knowledge comes to us in context, it is possible both to stand in a particular position, and to seek to recognise its limitedness by acknowledging and discussing different viewpoints. Our highlighted quotations this week address that challenge head on. Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer (also featured alongside Martin Luther King in our book selection, which looks at theological ethics in action) and Rowan Williams advocate the vantage point of the excluded and marginalised as a necessary starting point for thinking Christianly and morally.
 
Turning to the feature articles, Keith Kahn-Harris examines different Jewish approaches to civil liberty, while Anglican priest Jeremy Chadd movingly explains why he believes, along with Ekklesia and the Accord Coalition, that faith schools need to tackle their own practices of discrimination and exclusion if they are to be true to what they proclaim and adapted to the task of equipping people to live in a plural society.
 
In terms of research, we concentrate this time on a new Scottish initiative drawing together academics across the world engaged in mapping the Christian communities of the Middle East - often overlooked in the geopolitics and religious demography of the region, as Dr Harry Hagopian indicates.
 
Conflicting viewpoints will be very much to the fore as the leaders of the wealthy G20 nations meet in the midst of economic turmoil and continuing threat to people and planet. Ekklesia is supporting the March for Jobs, Justice and the Planet (see Event), which brings together a broad platform of organisations calling for substantial change, including financial regulation.
 
A rather different approach will no doubt be taken at the Entrepreneurship conference in Cambridge (Thinking in Action), which seeks to bring together people of faith looking to engage business solutions with ethics and the struggle against poverty worldwide.
 
Both those working for change within existing systems and those seeking to apply pressure from the edges to make our systems more responsive to values-driven, people-focussed critiques have a role to play in developing alternatives. In taking responsibility we frequently discover the need to be radical (to get to the roots of things), but from a position of involvement rather lofty superiority.