The duty to ask

"It is the duty of the church to ask what those beliefs and commitments [of the 'secular' state] are and to expose them to the light of the gospel. There is no genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture unless this happens." (Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks p132)

I just wrote a post on closing the achievement gap that attempts to call precisely this question. As I wrote it, I realized just how often this needs to happen in our public discourse, and not just in conversations with those who already share our assumptions.