Having engaged in some fairly abstract, systematic thinking throughout the book, I should now like to indicate a route back to matters of more direct, practical concern. My purpose in this is to invite readers who have engaged and put up with the abstraction of my argument thus far to do two things. First, to step further into the conceptuality I have been developing by exploring some of the ways in which it might be brought to bear on practical situations. Second, to find their own ways out of this theoretical interlude back into their own practical situations and continue their dialogue with this way of conceiving person and community there.

I have not found it at all easy, however, to decide how best to do this. The first difficulty is to select appropriate situations which might serve as illustrations or examples. The immediate problem here is that any way of conceiving personhood, community and society has infinite applications and implications in practice, and this makes it difficult to be precise about what it might mean in any particular case and to select an instance which exhibits something approaching the full range of potential required of an example. Furthermore, because the implications are pretty well infinite, whatever examples are chosen must avoid giving the implication that they define the range and extent of application.