The authors believe that a strong, nourishing community is characterized by people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. This kind of community is not quickly or easily put together, almost always has a history behind it, and therefore it is also a community of memory, defined partially by its past history and its memory of its past (333).
People in strong, nurturing communities are not merely self-oriented and interested in their own, individual successes. People in nurturing communities articulate their sense of self by reference to a narrative illustration of long-term commitments rather than just their desires and feelings. While these people tend to see certain breaks with the past as crucial turning points in their lives, they int
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