Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
Most Americans watch Friends rather than having friends.
Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives. . . Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.
School performance, public health, crime rates, clinical depression, tax compliance, philanthropy, race relations, community development, census returns, teen suicide, economic productivity, campaign finance, even simple human happiness - all are demonstrably affected by how (and whether) we connect with our family and friends and neighbours and co-workers.
What really matters from the point of view of social capital and civic engagement is not merely nominal membership, but active and involved membership.
A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Trust lubricates social life. Networks of civic engagement also facilitate coordination and communication and amplify information about the trustworthiness of other individuals.
Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate.
I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.
The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.
The people who are teaching religion and not teaching love are missing the message.
We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken.