Quotes About Community

By a faction, understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

If we are to be one Nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other Nations.

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.

The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.

When John O'Malley was a Jesuit novice, an older priest told him three things to remember when living in community: First, you're not God. Second, this isn't heaven. Third, don't be an ass.

Finding God often happens in the midst of a community—with a "we" as often as an "I.

Overall, being spiritual and being religious are both part of being in relationship with God. Neither can be fully realized without the other. Religion without spirituality can become a dry list of dogmatic statements divorced from the life of the spirit. This is what Jesus warned against. Spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community. That's what I'm warning against. For St. Ignatius

Jesus's hospitality to outcasts as well as Abraham and Sarah's

Every Sunday night in the novitiate our community gathered for "faith sharing," which meant speaking to one another about our spiritual lives: where we had experienced God in our daily lives and what our prayer was like. There were two rules. First, everything was confidential. Second, no comments were allowed after someone spoke, unless it was a question asked to clarify something.

My friend's experience reminded me that the search for a perfect religious community is a futile one. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, "The first and most elementary test of one's call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect." That holds for any religious organization.

Humor can help churches humble. It puts the community in touch with its inevitable limitations as a human organization, and its fundamental reliance to God. That leads us to God through the gateway of humility.

Some of the best advice from Jesuits on human relationships comes in earthy ways. When John O'Malley was a Jesuit novice, an older priest told him three things to remember when living in community: First, you're not God. Second, this isn't heaven. Third, don't be an ass. Had I followed those guidelines earlier, I could have saved myself years of self-induced heartache.

families), but it can still be helpful as one image among

I was friends with all different people and all different groups. And that led me to being friends with a few people who didn't even go to my school. Now I have the most amazing collection of friends of all ethnic backgrounds and upbringing and financial backgrounds.

Sometimes, when we feel the greatest need to be alone, it's the moment we should most welcome the company of others.

Talent in itself meant little; having the right people to appreciate it was everything.

parents, and Christian believers when their communities and environment are destroyed by corporations seeking profit? These are the questions of pastoral theology.

Remote villages and communities have lost their identity, and their peace and charm have been sacrificed to that worst of abominations, the automobile.

If we think of society as all that a people does under the veil of necessity, we must also think of it as a single finite game that includes any number of smaller games within its boundaries.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

A society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society.

Since a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other, we may say that a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.