Without a reference to human nature, and the specific inclination to live in community as essential for its flourishing, the prescriptive for civic decline can fall on deaf ears.
The reality of our social breakdown seemed to surround us on all sides. Our cities, towns, and neighborhoods have been built in ways that do not appear as though they were designed for human life and flourishing. We have even constructed tall fences around our homes, along with an abundance of trees to surround us in a sort of military fortress. Front porches were once an essential feature of homes, so as to incline us towards fulfilling our vocation as neighbors, and good stewards of those places where we live. These have given way to the back patio, that place of refuge which has conditioned citizens to seek to be removed from others, detached as a further means for celebrating our individual liberty. How many of us actually know the people who live on our street, especially those right next door?
Welcome to suburbia. A look at the social and political factors at work behind the destruction of community would probably be too much for a short internet essay, but they do merit an examination so that Christians know what the causes were and from which they need to be on guard.
[M]uch of the literature that accurately describes the decline of community in American civic life tends to lack a deeper explanation as to why human beings are in need of association at an ontological or metaphysical level.
The author doesn't develop this in the direction of communion ecclesiology and personhood as relation right away, but in the direction of apprenticeship in love [agape]. Later he talks about imitating God and writes "Human sociality is meant to be an imitation of the Trinitarian Sociality"
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