Quotes About Community

Community colleges play an important role in helping people transition between careers by providing the retooling they need to take on a new career.

The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws -- everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.

I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help... Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business - you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

I think there are a whole host of things that are civil rights, and then there are other things - such as traditional marriage - that, I think, express a community's concern and regard for a particular institution.

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.

Politics didn't lead me to working people. Working people led me into politics.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.

A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.

Our stories may be singular, but our destination is shared.

Thus, it is critical that CBPR efforts strive to understand the historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental contexts that have a significant impact on the communities involved, and work to improve the conditions that foster these health inequities. In addition, as elaborated here, it is essential that the cultural context of communities be understood and respected, explicitly informing partnership approaches to research.

We are all different. Yet we are all God's children. We are all united behind this country and the common cause of freedom, justice, fairness, and equality. That is what unites us.

When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side." … I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor... Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark.

At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?

You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.

Sometimes I wondered if it even mattered whether our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or draft beer, as long as we bent over them long enough to recognize each other as kin.

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

When visitors come to a worship service in my own religious tradition, a great deal depends on how warmly they are welcomed and whether they feel included or excluded by what they hear during the short time they are with us. We may have exactly one shot at communicating who we are to people who know nothing about us - or who think they already know a lot about us - but who, in either case, will remember us at the embodiment of our entire tradition, the prime exemplars of our faith.

Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.