Mindi Sitterud

“While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.”
― Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another's lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.”
― Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

“The word is always a word for others. Words need to be heard. When we give words to what we are living, these words need to be received and responded to. A speaker needs a listener. A writer needs a reader.

When the flesh – the lived human experience – becomes word, community
can develop. When we say, 'Let me tell you what we saw. Come and listen
to what we did. Sit down and let me explain to you what happened to us.
Wait until you hear whom we met,' we call people together and make our
lives into lives for others. The word brings us together and calls us
into community. When the flesh becomes word, our bodies become part of
a body of people.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith

“Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm."

"You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks