Quotes About Community

Do you know who else welcomes everyone to their table?" I asked. "Anyone desperate for friends." He snorted. "Who are you calling desperate?" Nick interrupted, coming over with his tray. "Anyone who would date you," I smiled sweetly. "Whatever, I'm awesome," Nick bused his tray.

If you think about it, there's something quite depressing about living in a gated community full of six-bedroom "Spanish-style" homes while, half a mile down the road, illegal migrant workers break their backs in the strawberry fields, and you have to drive past them every morning on the way to school.

Connor MacLeary showed up wasted and tossed the keg into the pool." Jimmy shrugged philosophically. "And my bitch-ass neighbor called the cops. We had to pretend it was a church barbecue.

Leah had not realized until she sat down at the table with her book club friends that she'd been waiting all year for this moment. To reunite with women who understood and didn't judge her, and women whom she could call friends.

Our children's health and well-being are dependent on our commitment to promoting food access and good eating habits at home, at school and in the community.

Accept the limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there may open themselves.

Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.

If there is going to be authentic renewal, it will have to happen in families and local church communities.

If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.

Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution.

I began to wonder what, exactly, mainstream conservatism was conserving. It dawned on me that some of the causes championed by my fellow conservatives—chiefly an uncritical enthusiasm for the market—can in some circumstances undermine the thing that I, as a traditionalist, considered the most important institution to conserve: the family. I

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be "salt and light" to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in the hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.

How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions? How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.

Put another way, if you don't educate your children for metaphysical truth and moral virtue, mainstream culture will do it for you. Absent shared commitment to these spiritual and moral verities, it is hard to see how we renew our families, our communities, and our country with an ethic of duty, self-restraint, stewardship, and putting the needs of people, not the state or corporations, first.

In a time when people have forgotten how to be neighbors, simply sharing a meal or a movie together is a political act.

a church that is a church only on Sunday and at other formal gatherings of the congregation is not only failing to be the church Christ calls us all to be; it is also not going to be a church with the strength and the focus to endure the trials ahead.

What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.

if you want to love and serve the church, the community, and the nation, you must first learn to love and serve your family.

golden age of community

Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life's purpose was to find one's own way experimentally.

A virtuous society, by contrast, is one that shares belief in objective moral goods and the practices necessary for human beings to embody those goods in community. To

Create Small Fortresses of Memory Figes's observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.