Month: July 2008
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A Diary of Community: A Manifesto in Four Parts
Community: Ideas of common interest, fellowship, cohesion, unity, cooperation, the list could simply go on. But do the above words really describe the feeling of community and what community really is? I think not. Community is something more than can be easily defined by words.
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Searches for Community
Community. It’s one of those things that I always seem to be looking for; to be a part of something bigger than myself, to be an integral member of a group of people. To truly feel that, “Yeah, this is where I belong.” It’s one of those things that I always seem to be looking…
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A Definition of Community
I’m watching as the carnival pulls into town and begins to set up. It’s 3:02 am and the city is asleep. Alone and contemplative under a cloudless sky, I inhale the night’s brisk air. The damp earth beneath me, the shimmering stars above; the juxtaposition of the tellurian world with the infinity of all that…
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Love, Listening & Service
How can we give each other enough space to experience the array of emotions and thoughts, the motivations and honest intentions that arise within an individual, while at the same time being close enough to support those who have fallen or are ceaselessly struggling with an inability to reach out to those around them?
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ATTN: Music Students
For a music student the words “community” and “music” have both a strong affinity and a palpable tension. The affinity is in the ideal of music as a universal language, the unity between people who connect through music, and the power of music to heal. The tension exists between artistic vision and money, perceived elitism…
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The Community Bi-Cycle of Trust
My bike had a brief and heroic fight with a car. I was on it. I fell. I broke a bone, hit the pavement pretty hard, but other than that was safe and quite alive. I rode an ambulance to the emergency room, and while waiting there was rather inspired by the experience. The next…
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Here Be Pirates
There is a story that I have been told that has guided much of my thinking and actions over the past few years. It is a true story. It is a story about our history, about us. It goes something like this.
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Keep Looking
It is wise to be skeptical of the term “community,” especially at Laurier. Too often, “community-building” translates into the squashing and forming of individuality into some sort of bland and bound groupthink. It doesn’t particularly matter where this happens – it could be while yelling color-coded chants during O-week or while signing onto a cause…
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Graham’s Startin’ a Cult!
I’ve always wanted a community to call my own, and starting a religious order seems to me the best way to do it. They’d never leave me! They’d love me and respect me and we’d have so much fun! But religious order seems inappropriate; I’m the farthest thing from a God.
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Fight to Create
I walked onto this campus in September of 2003, a bit terrified, really excited and completely confused, having just moved across the country to attend a university I didn’t know too much about and being your typical confused 19 year old. I’d love to be able to say that everything was perfect; that I was…