Quotes About Community

It is something—it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.

For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of.

Stegner shows us, again and again, that it is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one.

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

Twenty men crossing a bridge,Into a village,Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,Into twenty villages,Or one manCrossing a single bridge into a village.

Perhaps if she were to live with a homey type of family they could introduce her to "the right sort of people.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

Now is the time for all good men to come to.

Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,Yet utter the word Democratic, the wordEn-Masse.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.

As soon as discussion begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital topic for discussion is well started the keenest and most violent passions break forth. Easily destroyed as are early free states by forces from without, they are even more liable to destruction by forces from within.

It is a measure of our enculturation that the various acts of ministry (for example, counseling, administration, even liturgy) have taken on lives and functions of their own rather than being seen as elements of the one prophetic ministry of formation and reformation of alternative community.

Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!

Gathering God, draw us out beyond our cramped circles of care. Draw us toward the neighbor, the other, the outsider, the hurting one. May we practice compassion. Amen.

rage. They got up, drove him out of town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. (vv. 28–29) It

Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham

As a result, legitimate indignation is regularly siphoned away from speech with God to be acted out in other, perhaps more destructive ways. Such speech of rage addressed to YHWH is credible only when the worshiping community has confidence that the covenant God addressed is both willing and able to intervene in contexts of unbearable suffering.

The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

Hans Walter Wolff has suggested that the Sabbath is the great equalizer, for that day is a foretaste of the kingdom when all-great and small-are reckoned to be exactly equal .2' All-masters and slaves-are to engage in this most godlike activity of being at peace.