In the issue you have just read there have been a couple of items that could be described as "health, justice, and ethics" pieces.

This does not mean they are misfits, for a variety of reasons. For one, there is a huge overlap between faith and justice issues. For a second, we do not believe that the faith communities have any monopoly on talk about justice or the pursuit of it. And for a third, we believe that such communities and the general citizenry should draw on their separate and overlapping resources to make a common address to problems.

So a local story with national implications—which is what case studies and case stories tend to be—speaks of justice in respect to children in a particular state. Will the people of religious congregations and denominations, or those moved by faith-full impulses, show interest in the delivery of health care for poor children? Biblical traditions must recognize a mandate to do so.

Martha B. Holstein, meanwhile, has described a venture linking this center for health, faith, and ethics with a state agency which, in the nature of the case, cannot directly raise faith issues. She makes mention of the limitation of resources. The majority of the people in the state give some of their time, resources, and energy to religious institutions. Here again, the overlap between what these institutions offer and what the public needs is significant.

What struck me as I re-read the articles in final form was this: as complex as secular justice matters are, everything gets more complex when one introduces faith questions. No state can limit and no church can confine the questions children ask in times of crisis—or the imagination they display as they set out to provide their own answers. It's a touching vignette that Diane Komp has brought, and one likely to stay in the mind of anyone who wants to extend boundaries of empathy and care.

The problems that Robert M. Wolfe and Lisa K. Sharp, and then Joel Frader, raise cannot be easily addressed, to say nothing of being resolved. They will come up in countless new ways wherever the larger public interest and the particular religious sub-public collide in their interpretations and strategies.

It is easy to stand outside communities like those that oppose vaccination and view them as obstreperous at best, foolish in the middle, and destructive at their worst. What business have they jeopardizing my children's, my community's, and their children's health by resisting long-approved measures such as universal vaccination, and doing so on legal grounds? Yet that ease appears mainly among those who either have had the luxury of not having their own beliefs challenged publicly or the burden of not having had beliefs strong enough for anyone to challenge. The insistent questioners of mainstream practice will not go away and will not be silenced. They will trouble majorities. The wise goal is to promote understanding that can at least see to it that the troubling is creative and not merely disruptive.

A similar case comes up with Jehovah's Witnesses, troublers supreme on the civil, religious, and health fronts. In the end the Frader story is not, however, about Jehovah's Witnesses but about young people, children, and both their rights and their discretion. The courts have not found clear and simple ways to address this kind of issue. For example, in respect to conscientious objection to military service, the Supreme Court within a half century moved from having the courts respect objections because of objector's belief in a Supreme Being, to objections by those who are religious but without a Supreme Being, to objections of those who are not religious but hold to some philosophy that they adhere to with the fervor of conventional religionists. Some on and around the courts said that we had come now to sincerity tests. So it may be with both sincerity and maturity of discretion in health cases.

In any case, it is clear three times over in this issue that introducing faith onto the medical landscape may not solve anything. It does bring us closer to the real world as lived by real people, whose beliefs and problems do not fit into the standard texts. That is one reason we regularly issue the Bulletin.