Interesting Anthropological Works to look at:
The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of early Christian Women.-Laura Swan
Firewalking- Loring Danforth

John: Palmer in this book asserts that the objectivist viewpoint is responsible for much of the bad things that exist in our world today.  My problem with this viewpoint is that he attacks the scientific method and approaches it with disdain.  If we can look past that, however, you can find a valid argument about community in the classroom.  But it is hard for me to look past that and to put it behind me.

Matt: C. Wright Mills:  Mills is trying to talk about the distribution and organization of power.  He writes a very famous book: Power of the Elite.  For those of us that lived in the 60’s, Mills is probably the most important sociologist that was speaking out against the U.S.  He was a major leader through his writing of the revolutionaries.  He argues that the structure of power we exist in creates an elite group that all knows each other, a hierarchical structure.  What Mill argues is that in a mass society you have a center of power and you have individuals, each of whom are quite small and isolated.  There is a power relationship that works from the top down.  This was very relevant because most of the people seeing this had lived through WWII and saw what happened in Nazi Germany- it was seen as a warning to American society- the notion that a society where there is a strong social connection can give up their power to one “transmitter”.  One transmitter; many many receivers.
Mills gives us this notion of “publics”, which are like communities.  He says they are characterized by many things:  virtually as many people express opinions as receive them, public organization is so effective that there is the immediate possibility to answer back once heard, and there is an ability to answer back, even against power authorities, and that the power is non-authoritarian; autonomous.  The idea of the “mass” is the other end of the spectrum:  the power controls the thoughts and ideas, the transmission of the people.  Mills is not speaking about democracy- his fundamental understanding is that we work together to create a community where we are responsive to what exists in society and a worldly view.