Quotes About Community

African American boys or white boys. They don't have rituals, road maps, and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.

An auto factory that had threatened to close was still open, while a mortgage refinancing was keeping someone out there from losing a home.

I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

What binds us together is greater than what drives us apart.

I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant

You can't save trees by ignoring people

ending with the tagline "Yes we can.

That's why people become involved in organizing—because they think they'll get something out of it.

In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed. --on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people

Carl Sandburg poem come to life. There were inner-city kids jostling one another on a field trip, well-coiffed bankers working their flip phones, farmers in seed caps looking to widen the locks that allowed industrial barges to take their crops to market. You'd see Latina moms looking to fund a new day-care center and middle-aged biker crews, complete with muttonchops and leather jackets, trying to stop yet another legislative effort to make them wear helmets.

I had to ask strangers to join me and one another on real-life projects - fixing up a park, or removing asbestos from a housing project, or starting and after-school program.

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.

What I noticed at Grace-Calvary is the same thing I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the Bible: defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, 'People of the Book risk putting the book above people.

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.

Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedome to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.

Your success as a family... our success as a nation... depends not on what happens inside the White House, but on what happens inside your house.

Believe in something larger than yourself.

Some people give time, some money, some their skills and connections, some literally give their life's blood. But everyone has something to give.

across. Did you know that if a child never misses a day of school from first grade to twelfth grade, he or she would have spent only 9 percent of his or her life in the classroom? The other 91 percent is spent in the home or out in the community. We cannot expect teachers and the schools to solve all our children's problems.

And I don't think you're helpless. But it's okay to let someone help you once in a while.

I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.

But suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.

If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care.