After twelve years of teaching in a theological school, I had heard more than I wanted to hear about how bad things are. There was, both colleagues and students insisted, no sense of community anvmore, either in the corporate life of the school or in America at large. The sense of common existence had lost its conjuring touch over space and had been severelv contracted in time. Americans, they said, had neither a sense of continuity and tradition nor a vision of the future. Abandoning the larger dimensions of social and political life, there is nothing left but to fall back upon tiny redoubts of private affiliations.