The Christian Rationalist

Tag Archives: community

Solid and Liquid Communities

Leave a comment Posted by Sam Elder on August 9, 2019

America is facing a loneliness epidemic. So many of us wish that we had more community in our lives, but don’t know how to organically build it. We feel the pain of losing community as we inevitably leave home or graduate college, wondering, “Will I ever find a community like this again?”

So we check out meetups, attend public talks or sporting events, and go to our workplace’s happy hours. Yet this motley of activities can’t really replace that warm dorm community of college or loving home environment of our memories. What’s different, and can we ever get it back?

This isn’t everyone’s experience, of course. But whether it resonates with you or not, I’d like to offer something of an answer, at least to the first of those questions. And to the second, I hope that by understanding the different shapes that community forms in our lives, we can identify what we might be missing and where we need to look next.

Cherish Thick Communities

8 Comments Posted by Sam Elder on June 16, 2017

Since graduating from Caltech five years ago, I have gone back to visit on eight occasions, for at least a week each trip. Why? What keeps drawing me back there?

It’s definitely not because of the location; as much as I like In-N-Out and boba milk tea, they aren’t worth flying across the country for. Actually, each visit has driven home more and more to me that I don’t really want to live in LA long-term, with its ridiculous sprawl, traffic, and general lack of a third dimension.

Photo courtesy of Brynan Qiu, who was riding with me in a rental car I was driving.

The Fractured Republic by Yuval Levin: Summary and Review

5 Comments Posted by Sam Elder on September 3, 2016

In the midst of a very unusual presidential campaign, it can be difficult to think past the election in November. To try to grasp a wider perspective and see around the corner to the most useful politics of the future, I decided to read The Fractured Republic by Yuval Levin, hearing about it from this review. Levin is a conservative intellectual, but the book comes highly recommended by thinkers on both the left and the right, and deservedly so, as I would soon discover.

Not everyone has the time to read hundreds of pages, so I thought it would be useful to summarize it here. If you’re at all intrigued, I would highly recommend reading the full book, of course. Levin builds his theses very thoroughly and convincingly, and seems to describe quite accurately a wide variety of perspectives on recent history, not just his own. His writing is appropriately nuanced and footnoted in a way that this condensed version inevitably will fail to be.