Quotes About Community

God's kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God's Spirit to do God's kingdom work in the shape of a new community.

This otherness problem is what the gospel "fixes," and the story of the Bible is the story of God's people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.

As the priest and Levite thought they could follow the Torah and not offer aid to the stranded, dying man (Luke 10:25–37), so Isaiah's community thought they could abstain from food and pass by the needs of others on their way to God. Fasting never stands alone. Fasting, if it is genuine, brings us into a communal spirituality because it is a response to the lack of justice in the community.

the consistency of the Old Testament warnings for the covenant community formed a natural bridge to the New Testament warnings.

If we as Christians with a faithful witness would set the example, not by way of reaction but by way of reasoned empathy, we might set the tone for more shalom in our world.

Every scene of heaven in the Bible shows us a vision of the Church praying together and singing together and praising together.

The greenest home is the one you don't build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that's already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want.

Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple effect with no logical end.

To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential.

Roughly, religion is a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception. […] The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one's faith deep and one's commitment sincere.

The Old Testament (OT) statement of the demand for individuals and communities to be moral comes in two primary ways—the commands to obey God's law (Ex. 19:5–6) and the mandate to follow the way of wisdom (Prov. 8:1, 22–31).

Remote work demands social proactivity.

the broken window theory, the idea popularized by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.1 She examined why some neighborhoods in New York City were safer than others and concluded that neighborhoods that were well maintained by their inhabitants, including small things like picking up trash and fixing broken windows, tended to have less crime. In other words, by regularly fixing small things, you prevent bigger problems from starting.

Laughter leads to running jokes, and running jokes lead to a shared history, and a shared history is culture.

Where are all the reasonable people?" and realized the answer was that many reasonable people don't contact support.

Avoid letting anyone in your sphere of influence flail or panic. Stay calm, help others to stay calm, and work together

On joining the aquarium community we all agreed to put aside our carnivorous ways to live off Professor Brown's fish food. Every one of us agreed! If we start to eat each other, what kind of life would that be?

The street outside my window is one of a million likeminded Los Angeles streets. Taggers, homeless, families and lovers, thieves and beggars, running children and old women, churches, bars, corner stores, Spanish, Cambodian and Armenian words and accents. I want to hug my street and all within, to feel the throbbing pulse beating its steady rhythm.

It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it's about time to open a snack bar.

I began to see it was the community, not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarians were only as important as the community they inspired. If I was going to continue with this career, my job wouldn't be to protect information, it would be to bring the community together and inspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for.

Formal talks are the special opportunity we give ourselves to discuss our private work in a public voice, to make the labor of our minds and hearts communal.

I'm very pleased. Very, very pleased. But I really must ask—why the hell have men and women been throwing money in my kettle for the past half hour, telling me they're sorry for what happened in the Videnza?" "It's because they're sorry for what happened in the Videnza," said Galdo.

If you're going to live here, staying civil is as much a duty as sitting the steps or washing dishes. Now, while I bask in the glow of another moral sermon delivered with the precision of a master fencer, hold your applause and let's get back to last night.

A glass poured on the ground for a stranger without friends.