Tibet's globally respected spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has arrived in Scotland. He is embarking on a two-day tour of three Scottish cities.

Missionaries in Palestine during the period from the First World War until the Israeli declaration of the state and the connected Palestinian Nakba of 1948 were determined, they continually argued, to stay out of the controversy and not take sides, Dr Michael Marten reminds us. But what do concepts of 'neutrality', 'fairness' and 'respect' mean in the midst of conflict, in complex lesions of history and in its writing? Tidiness may be convenient but damaging to both truthfulness and the search for justice.

The nationalisms represented in the Eurovision Song Contest the European Football Championships and the Queen's Jubilee are of different shapes and levels of intensity, observes Graeme Smith, editor of the international journal Political Theology. What Christianity at its best offers is a vision of how we hold local commitments in a wider, plural context: because of Pentecost, in fact.

The question for us today is how, in the many Os we might draw, and in the many circles we form on a daily basis, we negotiate our way across the empty spaces and the deep chasms they inevitably bring into our view, says Dr Andrew Hass. Yet Giotto’s legacy is not all lost: he at least tells us that something, even if that something is a “nothing”, remains there for our creation.