Humans bond to families but not necessarily to neighbors.
Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.
I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.
I grew up in a little town called Uckfield, and there's not much to do - so we used to fight a lot. I was never in serious trouble, but we used to have the local bobby round the house saying, 'Rory's been up to this again.'
The relationship between God and his people was always the one having absolute primacy, the one that had basically to determine all human relationships, whether those within the covenanted community itself or those between the covenanted community and the outside world.
Writing about your community is difficult for any writer.
The trouble is that America's become a utopia accessible only to some people. Others get trampled on. Perhaps it's a problem of size. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, once gave the ideal number of a given community as 148. That seems about right to me. There's something idealistic about that - in a group of 148 people you can get to know everybody.
Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.
I'm not talking about what you hear from 5 per cent of the population on the radio, in the papers. I don't pay attention to it. I travel around the country. I'm happy I have a good relationship with the people.
Families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry.
Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.
Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.
If you look at any sitcom that you watch, if it takes place in, say, a small town in Massachusetts, and it's about the dynamics of the people in that town, the showrunner probably grew up in a town like that, witnessed things, and created content.
I am in favor of community policing because it builds better working relationships with the communities.
