Community Topics

Paganism can be defined as the elevation of a special space to ultimate value and dignity. Paganism has a god who is bound to one place beside and against other places. Therefore, paganism necessarily is polytheistic.... Space means more than a piece of soil. It includes everything which has the character of “beside-each-otherness.” Examples of spatial concepts are blood and race, clan, tribe, and family. We know how powerful the gods are who give ultimate dignity and value to a special race and to a special community of blood. In all of them the “beside-each-otherness” is dominating. Human culture is rooted in these realities, and it is not surprising that they always have received adoration, consciously and unconsciously, by those who belong to them, and consequently that they always have claimed universal validity. Modern nationalism is the actual form in which space is ruling over time, in which polytheism is a daily reality. Nobody can deny the tremendous creativity of national community. Nobody would be willing to deprive himself of the physical and psychological space which is his nation.
—Paul Tillich (1886–1975)

They should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

The real community of man ... is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.
—Allan Bloom (1930–1992)