Neighborhood

Here's an article about neighborliness. It's one of a series our local newspaper has done on interesting neighborhoods in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy NY area. My neighborhood is the first one of this summer's series.

While the reporter slightly exaggerates the close-knit quality of the neighborhood, it's still the most neighborly I've ever lived in, by far. And in almost 77 years, I've racked up 25 neighborhoods in 12 cities or towns in 6 states in the Northeast, the Far West, the Deep South, and the Midwest.

Neighborhoods are important. But with changed geographic and demographic patterns, particularly since the end of WW2, churches play less and less of a local parish role. Hence the appeal of house churches. Yet even they, judging from my one experience with a house church, draw from beyond neighborhoods. It makes me think about our social origins in bands, tribes, and villages, where religion expressed and reinforced the social bonds that already existed. Our situation is very different now. We talk about 'community' a lot, perhaps because we have so little of it. We keep trying to reinvent it and are inclined to redefine 'community' in terms of categories of people rather than in terms of face-to-face social interactions and closely-linked networks of interactions.