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Religion, belief and culture should be recognized as potential sources of moral purpose and personal strength in healthcare, enhancing the welfare of both clinicians and patients amidst the experience of ill-health, healing, suffering and dying. Communication between doctors and patients and between healthcare staff should attend sensitively to the welfare benefits of religion, belief and culture. Doctors should respect personal religious and cultural commitments, taking account of their significance for treatment and care preferences. Good doctors understand their own beliefs and those of others. They hold that patient welfare is best served by understanding the importance of religion, belief and culture to patients and colleagues. The sensitive navigation of differences between people's religions, beliefs and cultures is part of doctors' civic obligations and in the UK should follow the guidance of the General Medical Council and Department of Health and Social Care. In particular, apparent conflict between clinical judgement or normal practices and a patient's culture, religion and belief should be considered carefully. Doctors' own religion or culture may play an important role in promoting adherence to this good practice. In all matters, doctors' conduct should be governed by the law and arrangements for conscientious objection that are in effect. The strongest ethical arguments in favour of conscientious objection provisions concern the moral integrity of professionals, the objectives and values of the medical profession, the nature of healthcare in liberal democracy and the welfare of patients. In practice, arguments mounted against conscientious objection have not been found persuasive.

This article considers the political significance of game theoretical notions of cooperation by responding theologically to the writings of David Willetts, a minister in the UK government. The argument is that the forms of cooperative institutional life which societies require can be neither explained nor planned for solely by mathematical modelling of rational self-interest. What altruistic, civic cooperation depends upon is a complex web of affective trust, often theologically formed by open-handed faith rather than a self-protective pinch, so that wise risks may be taken for the sake of future generations.

This paper examines the context of evidence-informed practice (EIP) by inquiring into how educational practice is defined and organised, and how predominant understandings of educational practice are concomitant with preferences for particular forms of evidence. This leads to discussion of how certain educational research traditions speak (or are unable to speak) to these evidence requirements, and how this shapes the nature of EIP. While the rise of EIP can be understood as part of the increasing attention paid by governments to systemic 'improvement' in education systems, it can be argued that the lack of a coherent body of educational knowledge in many national traditions enables governments to exercise control not only of definitions of 'what works' in education but also over conceptualisations of educational practice. For some policy makers and practitioners, the much-remarked dislocation between 'evidence' and teaching practice in many national contexts can only be solved by a narrowing of what counts as knowledge alongside a more prescriptive control over what counts as acceptable educational judgement. However, such an alignment serves to exclude wider educational purposes and arguably instrumentalises pedagogical relations. Meanwhile, some continental European countries maintain traditions that may serve to mitigate such developments, although these traditions are not without challenge.

The argument is that a revised understanding and practice of diakonia can speak apologetically into the turn to philosophy, the social world and responsiveness to persons within healthcare policy and practice. This turn opens up contested questions about what constitute goodness in healthcare, with practical ramifications for the support of health-related social agency such as that pursued by churches and ecclesial organisations. To address these questions, John N Collins' work is critically developed by interweaving the political and ecclesial senses of diakonia. The social authority of diakonia proceeds from its commissioned and representative nature and its concomitant eschatological purposiveness and missional logic. Thus conceived the duality of diakonia yields benefits to the conception, preservation and practice of health-related social agency and of 'service' more generally. The outcome is an Anglican political theology which can avoid some of the difficulties of German Protestants' concept and practice of Diakonie¬ and address key issues raised in the others papers in this special section.

In some popular and political discourse, 'compassion' is commonly conceived as a simple or 'given' aspect of the world. And yet public discussion also focusses on whether 'compassion' has gone wrong in some way, suggesting that there might be various more or less satisfactory versions of compassion. At the same time, some thinkers doubt whether compassion should any longer be expected of those working in healthcare. This article draws on philosophical and theological resources to argue that the conceptual context which forms compassion is crucial for determining the ethos of healthcare. The discussion explores three themes – politics, suffering and responsibility – which must be addressed in order to understand what is wrong with compassion, to identify lines of future investigation and to develop possible remedies.

This chapter argues that covenantal thought and practice has the capacity to discipline marketisation processes in service of an ethos of gracious compassion in healthcare. It engages critically with the analyses of Diagnosis Related Groups, Personal Budgets and Defensive Medicine offered by Feiler, Herring, Papanikitas and Jani in the preceding three chapters, showing that the key themes of 'care' and 'work' can be illumined by a covenantal approach which works judiciously with healthcare marketisation. Constructively, it draws on parallels in the Armed Services to argue for five required characteristics of a written and institutionalised Healthcare Covenant between health and care workers and the public. Drawing on traditions of pastoral and political theology to explore the psychological and social influences of marketisation, this chapter provides the bridge between the systemic issues of Part I, the policy concerns of Part II and the questions of professional ethics considered in Part III.

This article explores how conversation between the thought of certain Islamic and Christian thinkers, such as Agapetos, Gregory the Great and Sa`di, sheds light on how loyalty and obligation function within institutions of kingship and in political experience more generally. The argument shows how a focus on Late Antique notions of kingship is a particularly fruitful focus for conversation between Islamic and Christian political thought. The exposition of texts pays particular attention to political concepts' dependence on salvation historical understanding in order to examine ways of conceptualising and generating the interrelation of obligation and criticism that commonly constitutes the interrelation of peoples with rulers. With Hellenism as the bridging tradition through which diverse forms of Islamic and Christian political thought pass, the argument explores the moral psychology of institutions of kingship, especially affections such as fear and love by which political loyalty and obligation are said to operate. The conversation concludes by developing a notion of 'good shepherds under law', evoked both by Christian interpretations of the Davidic tradition and Islamic interpretations of the relation of ruler to ruled, summarised as a 'pastoral contract'. These political interpretations, while not reducible to each other, together build a bridge to support that tense communion through which better understanding of political life may be gained. In exploring the psychology of leadership as an elemental phenomenon of political life, the argument signals beyond the premodern contexts from which the authors discussed are principally drawn towards interpretation of present-day political experience.

This chapter is an exercise in political theology exploring ways in which European Union citizens might think about political life. The chapter has four sections: first, a discussion of how people, especially Europeans, identify with their places and their politics – this section considers the chief threat to European peace, ethnocentrism; second, a discussion of two key civic tasks regarding the interrelation of European Union member-states, 'adequate identity' and 'sufficient agreement'; third, a conversation between contrasting political analyses of human motivation and civic participation concerning these tasks; fourth and finally, an account of the distinctive contribution of ecclesial identity to European consciousness.

This article responds to Jeffrey Stout's argument in favour of immanent criticism of religious convictions in public reasoning by examining the affective dimension of religious loyalty and conscience. To this end, a conversation between Jonathan Edwards and Martha Nussbaum is undertaken to explore the basis on which the shared evaluations of religious citizens, especially Christians, should inform public discourse. Whereas the affections of Edwards's sense of the heart are shown to be epistemologically over-realised and in unsustainable tension with the political implications of his contested social ontology, Nussbaum's cognitivist theory of emotions improves on Edwards's by providing a basis for social criticism of religious convictions, but is then found incompatible with her own commitment to a Rawlsian overlapping consensus. Moreover, the political appeal of the Protestant-Stoic conscience she advocates is cast into doubt by considering how Protestant and perhaps Islamic concepts of conscience structure eschatological loyalties that foster not Rawls's overlapping consensus or even Nigel Biggar's 'tense consensus' but rather the 'tense communion' appropriate to twenty-first-century democracies.

Workforce development partnerships between higher education institutions and employers involve distinctive social and technical dynamics that differ from dominant higher education practices in the UK. The New Labour government encouraged such partnerships in England, including through the use of funding that aimed to stimulate reform to institutional processes and build capacity. In the broader policy context, greater workforce development activity had the objective of supporting national skills policy targets and increasing industrial productivity. In this article, the notion of the productive system is used to identify factors influencing the outcomes of this policy, using three models of the production of higher education provision. Attention is paid both to the structure in which these productive processes are situated, and the stages that result in new higher education programmes. To evaluate the sustainability of the productive systems, the development of mutual interests between participants is examined, in addition to the norms that structure culture and relationships and the distribution of power and influence. The role of the institution in respect of the employer and the student is also addressed, with reference to uncertainty regarding the value of workforce development provision in economic and political contexts of perpetual change.

In the United Kingdom higher education environment, government may make efforts to encourage institutions to engage in governance structures to secure policy objectives through a steering approach. In this article connections between skills governance structures and the recent Higher Education Funding Council for England workforce development programme are examined in the context of the wider implementation of the Leitch Review of Skills in England. Using analysis of policy documents, submissions to a select committee inquiry, and a series of interviews undertaken at higher education institutions, limited co-ordination between skills governance and institutions is identified, which is likely to have been a consequence both of the open-ended approach taken by government to the implementation of this policy in higher education and the ineffectiveness of governance approaches as mechanisms for steering higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

The focus of this project, New Conversations in Islamic and Christian Political Thought, concerns the 'pre-modern' or 'long' traditions of political thought in Islam and Christianity. The renaissance in Christian political thought since World War II has not yet witnessed a sustained engagement with Islamic political thought. Meanwhile, the interface of religion and political life has increasingly become a major focus of academic and public discourse. By exploring the varied traditions of Islam and Christianity, this project seeks to retrieve and develop wisdom in political understanding with a view to enriching this discourse.

How does the market affect and redefine healthcare? The marketisation of Western healthcare systems has now proceeded well into its fourth decade. But the nature and meaning of the phenomenon has become increasingly opaque amidst changing discourses, policies and institutional structures. Moreover, ethics has become focussed on dealing with individual, clinical decisions and neglectful of the political economy which shapes healthcare. This interdisciplinary volume approaches marketisation by exploring the debates underlying the contemporary situation and by introducing reconstructive and reparative discourses. The first part explores contrary interpretations of 'marketisation' on a systemic level, with a view to organisational-ethical formation and the role of healthcare ethics. The second part presents the marketisation of healthcare at the level of policy-making, discusses the ethical ramifications of specific marketisation measures and considers the possibility of reconciling market forces with a covenantal understanding of healthcare. The final part examines healthcare workers' and ethicists' personal moral standing in a marketised healthcare system, with a view to preserving and enriching virtue, empathy and compassion.