Quotes About Community

If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings.

He imagines what would happen if the whole street called his name, joining with the mother's small voice, the whole street lifting the words and the words spreading through this city, taking flight like a flock of birds at dusk, clouding the sky,... the name, pouring down from the sky... across all our misconnected world, a chorus of name-saying, a brief redemptive span of attention.

A globalized world is by now a familiar fact of life. Building walls or moats may sound appealing, but the future belongs to those who tend to their people and then boldly engage the rest of the world, near and far.

In our finest hours...the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.

Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir-the people will set things right.

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

picnic table.

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

We must, together as a nation, stop watching Fox.

December 25 is National Jews Go to the Movies Day.

I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.

Culture is not a territory to be won; it is instead a resource we are called to steward."4

If we care about knowledge, freedom and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community.

BYSTANDER EFFECT: Phenomenon documented by social scientists in which people are less likely to help someone in distress when there are others present who can render assistance

it is never just the robins communicating with the other robins, the song sparrows with the other song sparrows, the juncos with the other juncos. In the yard and in the trees, it's everyone communicating with (because they are eavesdropping on) everyone else—spring, summer, fall, and winter: ripples within ripples, a vast web with many seams and confusions; concentric rings bouncing off concentric rings; subtle sounds, subtle scents, subtle movements.

The village may have replaced "the state," and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.

But at the same time, progressives want to claim that any effort to resist the forces of "progress" is an act of aggression in the culture war. From abortion and gay marriage to the hot fad for transgender rights, progressives want every institution and community to bend the knee to their movement. And when anyone refuses, the resisters are cast as the aggressors.

My tribe deserves more than your tribe.

Men snälla lilla hjärtat, jag är jude, jag firar inte heller jul, men nu pratar vi om att dekorera lägenheten och då är jag helt med. Du kan sätta dig där. Jag heter Paul. Du hette Benjamin. Vanvettigt vackert namn förresten.

Genom att begränsa sin kontext till att bara gälla likasinnade uppnår man normalitet. Det kan vara livsfarligt, men det kan också vara livsnödvändigt. Varje människa har behov av att åtminstone tillfälligtvis få uppleva sig normal.

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

Post-Christendom allows the church to rediscover itself as agents of God's justice…[as] a community that 'does justice' in a different way to the state and can witness prophetically to the state about injustice. The church can say: 'Give us your prisoners, give us your poor, give us your homeless children and we will look after them.' The law tells us only what has gone wrong, not how to put it right. In this respect, the biblical concept of justice is far more empowering.

Post-Christendom churches will be untidy communities where belonging, believing and behaving are all in flux rather than neatly fixed and integrated. Churches are likely to be defined less by what they believe and more by the values they hold and the way they behave. The communities that thrive will be the ones with core values or guiding principles - and many of these will be unmistakably political.

Call it loyalty, call it what you want, but I suppose I've got people up here who I'm really tight with, we've made a lot of great bonds over the last few years and I've got people in my corner I can trust.