Quotes About Community

The only problem with seeing people you know is that they know you.

I was surprised that every single person I talked to had a story about how depression had affected their lives. Carmelita Gamboa, a teenager in Michigan, later wrote to me, The sad thing is, after a while, it starts to feel like home. It does, doesn't it?

Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.

Some people at the party, she adds, are freaks, then mentions a drug I've never heard of, and tells me a story that involves ski masks, zombies, a van, chains, a secret community, and asks me about a Hispanic girl who disappeared in some desert.

Todo el mundo tiene meido. Pero si nos mantenemos unidos, si intentamos estar disponibles para los otros, ya no tendremos miedo.

Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire? —as quoted by Diana Butler Bass1

To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighbor means recognizing that there are ultimately no strangers. . . . Everybody is my neighbor! . . . Everybody is my brother! . . . There are no isolated monads wounded on the other side of the street! . . . We're all connected.

These special holidays give rise to various liturgical calendars that suggest we should mark our days not only with the cycles of the moon and seasons, but also with occasions to tell our children the stories of our faith community's past so that this past will have a future, and so that our ancient way and its practices will be rediscovered and renewed every year.

Trying to stop people from learning, sharing, and loving is a losing game because it means working against God and the plotline of God's universe.

stay Christian while rejecting supremacy and embracing solidarity instead.

In other words, when the community of faith gathers, its purpose is to equip its members for a life of love and good deeds when the community scatters.

The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way?

If you see Christian identity as a pathway to innocence—as many if not most Christians currently see it

Each white person gets to be considered on their own terms, and every other group must answer as a whole for the crimes of the one or the few."1

Some of them moved to the desert or wilderness, seeking to create monastic communities where faith expressing itself in love could be experimented with as the norm. Others formed schools and missions or launched new congregations, orders, and movements, translating their spiritual breakthrough into compassionate organizing and action.

Traditional theologians use another word for solidarity: incarnation

if you and I do not stay Christian, if we give up whatever little voice and influence we have inside the larger Christian community, won't we be an answer to the misguided prayers of the religious company men and their followers, who want the rest of us gone?

For those who regress, the fear of what lies beyond Complexity feels so terrifying, or the sense of belonging that is often found in strict Stage One communities feels so alluring, that they willingly resubmit to Stage One authority, or even authoritarianism.

Church!" she cried. "Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse.

Deeply. As we have seen, humans prevailed in no small part because our species has the capacity to pool brain and brawn, to live and work in groups, to divvy up responsibilities and effectively meet the needs of the collective. The greater social cohesion of those in a religiously bound group would have made them a more formidable force in the ancestral world, and according to this line of argument, securing an adaptive role for religious affiliation.

It's said that the Fremen scum drink the blood of their dead. Not the blood, sir. But all of a man's water ultimately, belongs to his people - to his tribe./ The human body is composed of some seventy percent water by weight./ A dead man, surely, no longer REQUIRES that water.

It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved world-view centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these desert dwellers seem brutish Ã¢â'¬Â¦ just as outsiders appear to them. Pardot Kynes, The People of Arrakis

My son, this is more essential than anything you will learn on an industrial world: people are more important than machines.

your lives be as full and happy as ours,and may the seasons be kind to you and your friends. The door of our Abbey is always open to any travellers roaming the dusty path between the woodlands and the plains.