As our commitment to community re-stories our thinking about economics, architecture, the faith narrative, art, and journalism, we have a context in which tools and more traditional forms of action are useful. Now tools for re-humanization, engagement, and community building become the practice of communal restoration. These create the conditions for authentic transformation.

The tools could go under the title of “neighborliness.” Neighborly protocols. Neighborliness is not about who lives next door. Neighborliness is what the Jews discovered in the wilderness. It includes those actions that value place, local cooperation, citizen voices, gifts, hospitality, associational life, how we gather, and producing what we need rather than buying it. It begins with a process of re-authorizing whose voice counts and deciding that citizens’ voices have something more important and useful to say about the future than do the traditional voices of experts, the academy, institutional leaders, and elected officials.