The frequent blending of the terms extremist and radical makes no sense to me.  I do not believe an extremist of any persuasion can be radical.  To take an extreme view implies an equally extreme reduction of the scope of human consideration in any morally based decision. The radical will not tolerate such an abbreviation of the human state.  If the extremist works the shallow shores, the radical works the central depths where authority, creativity, consolation and power originate. 

If you lose a child, or your life companion, or anything deeply loved,  a grief process will  force you to the depths of your loss and not relent until you made your peace with your unique inventory of radical loss.  Grief is the hard mentor of a radical life.  Loss triggers the compulsory conscious tour for the survivor of the history and depth of any human connection.  When one aggressor mows down 14 innocent people at a bus stop, and the responder retaliates with a bomb on a civilian hospital, while consequences may be immeasurably radical in both actions, but the decision process that led to such destruction was extreme for both aggressor and responder.

Love and human life strike me as radical propositions. Todays violent aggression in politics and global matters leave the signature skid marks of extremism; just shallow black marks of everlasting, expanding consequence directing, like a traffic arrow, the movement of our time over a cliff.  Love as described by our primary religious teachers calls for a radical understanding, and demands a uniquely radical response to loss. ‘Good’ for this project calls for the creative radical response that respects the attributes of good. Committed hatred, it seems, will always settle for the blind, shallow, fatal cut of the extremist mind.  Good is hard work, but good work nevertheless.