Quotes About Community

Church means giving up the fantasy that we can find fulfillment and righteousness alone. It means doing things at inconvenient times with eccentric people in sometimes clumsy ways--because life is a team game, and on judgment day God will have nothing to say to us if we think we can come without the others.

The Eucharist is the technology God uses for constructing a new society.

Instead we have a tradition of common prayer, a general commitment to the well-being of all, including nonmembers of the church, and a desire to seek a faith that can be shared by people of a wide diversity of

One of Origen's arguments for the truth of Christianity was that while philosophy had only made the elite good, Christianity had lifted people of all levels of society and of every different type and race to a "philosophical" way of life. . . . Just as male needs female, rich needs poor, white needs black, so intellectuals need the simple. . . . The church is itself when it bridges all these gaps and tensions between people of different kinds.

Sandor Ellix Katz

this. Whom should I thank?" "The city of Purcell.

crowd in the

All little lambs need a shepherd.

There were others like her. Of course there were. How had she ever thought there would not be?

birth defects, as well as congenital heart problems, were elevated in communities served by a drinking water reservoir that had been contaminated with the herbicide atrazine. Atrazine, on the market since 1959 and banned for use in much of Europe, is the most popular pesticide used in the United States.

It was a universal welcome—Make yourself at home; Mi casa es su casa; Ahlan wa-sahlan; Baruch habah

I can't have information I know would be of interest to someone and not share it.

I can't have information I know would be of use to someone and not share it.

No estaba herida. Sólo gritaba de dolor. El fiscal se sentó entre una anciana mamacha que lloraba en quechua y un policía con un corte en la mano que goteaba sangre. Abril Rojo

of how diversity can be used by organizations as a form of public relations.

It's like Charlie told the cop. For this old man, this is home.

a gaggle of old ladies is glued to the window at the end of the hall like children or jailbirds. They're spidery and frail, their hair as fine as mist. Most of them are a good decade younger than me, and this astounds me. Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.---- There are five of them now, white headed old things huddled together and pointing crooked fingers at the glass.

You may be on your own. But you won't be alone.

The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole community is to join together in a far-reaching egalitarian coalition and confront them in unison.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members' subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

Boiled down, the basic principle is this, in Junger's words: "Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair.

Disaster survivors and their neighbors instantly place whatever food they can collectively hunt and gather in common. There is no class, no race, no political orientation. Such meat sharing lies at the root of humans' remarkable egalitarian tendencies. Those tendencies are reinforced every time the ritual is enacted—especially at moments of vivid intensity

The initial phase of this revolt was the Farmers' Alliance movement, born on the Texas frontier.

When people receive gifts, no matter how innocent, they feel obligated and try to reciprocate. It is a lovely reflex in everyday life and has furthered community bonding and artistic vocation. But in politics, it leads to corruption. An outright ban on such gifts would protect officials from the unintended worst consequences of their best reflexes—and from the temptations that will inevitably be dangled before them.