Quotes about Community

At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.

Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If you can get that table out of doors, so the sun can kiss the skin—if as you dine together you can also provide help for others—then, according to Myerson, you've won the lottery of life.[36]

Christians have become passive spectators in worship rather than active participants. By and large, we come to church to "watch the show" rather than to engage and participate.

Anyone who doesn't need company is either greater than a man, and is a God, or lesser than a man, and is a beast.17 —Aristotle, as quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas

For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.

One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.

St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

I do not doubt that we would become more useful if we praised God more, and others would join us, for they would see that God has blessed us.