single, but....and yet, ....

We're a community of predominantly single people but that notwithstanding we make concerted effort not to label us as a singles ministry because it would seem to be highlighting something that, while true, is not how we would like single people to think of themselves primarily. Singleness, despite the ambivalence with which the culture (and sometimes the Church) regards it, is not to be thought of as some second-class, "in between" time--that is, as if it were just some sort of holding pattern we must all endure before we get to the "real" life that is marriage and family. The privileges of singleness are not insubstantial but the longer one conceives of their singleness as some sort of purgatorial sentence, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Still, it is not as if we are trying to perpetuate singleness, but we labor in such a way as to see that everyone lives faithfully and passionately in whatever status they presently inhabit.


All that as a prelude to this article on what appears to be our innate need for connectedness. I wonder what you think. Chime in.

and, while you're at it, how do we help foster the kind of "authoritative community" the article speaks of--the kind of community that is paradoxically both needed and avoided by most in our culture? His article and this concept of community is grounded on research in a new book on the effects of the absence of such communities. The Holy Spirit's role notwithstanding, how do we improve the ways we engender an ethos that is "committed to one another over time and who exhibit and are able to pass on what it means to be a good person?"