ABSTRACT
Community comprises one of the most overused terms employed in contemporary discourse by scholars, practitioners, and the general public alike; indeed, the Library of Congress lists 5,231 books with community in the title, and a Google search of the term produced more than 4.8 billion web sites! In part, the extensive use of this term reflects questions, issues, and concerns about the relationship between the individual and the collective grappled with by philosophers (especially Western philosophers) over the centuries. Scholars have also argued that the concept is particularly compelling in contemporary, postmodern life (especially in the United States), where we seemingly search for a sense of place (Meyrowitz, 1985), struggle with a saturated self (Gergen, 1991), and lack an ability to conceive of the common good (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, 1991). “In such a world,” contended Adelman and Frey (1997), “community bespeaks what we have lost and are trying to regain” (p. 1).
