I really didn’t start thinking about “community” until I went away to college. But I had experienced a particular kind of community before then, during my upbringing in Berwyn. And as I studied, practiced and wrote about community over the decades, my understanding of it became richer and more nuanced, shaped by different stages of life, exposure to literature, insights of smart people, and the circumstances unique to the places in which I lived.
I first got fired up about community at the Newman Center, next to SIU’s campus in Carbondale. There, exposed to inspired liturgy and the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, community became something emerging around us, powered by God’s love, moving evolution forward toward better forms of human organization.
That progressive notion of Chardin’s contrasted with the stable, somewhat defensive orientation of the neighborhood I had grown up with. My boyhood community in the ’60s and early ’70s was largely Catholic, white and traditional with respect to men’s and women’s roles. It included many good folks on the nearby blocks, but it was not a community pressing to evolve. In fact, with the racial integration coming in the mid-’70s, Berwyn took a decidedly more defiant and restrictive stance toward it than did Oak Park.
The inspired theological view of community that I acquired in Carbondale moved me to pursue a graduate degree in community development. As I have written before, that training would include helping Oak Park as an intern with its efforts to embrace integration [Peeling back the layers of racial bias, Viewpoints, June 18, 2020].
Post-master’s degree, I practiced community development in Pennsylvania and Indiana. Then, I pursued a doctorate in Political Science, with an interest in understanding the larger forces that worked against and for the formation of good communities. I studied a neighborhood in Indianapolis, examining forces from “above and below” that created different kinds of neighborhood institutions: a health center, a community organizing group, an economic development organization, and a multiservice center.
My studies exposed me to communitarian writings that extolled the importance of building on shared values, a common history, mutually embraced goals and affection for a place. I also learned and taught urban political theory that unpacked power dynamics and conflict as they occurred in neighborhoods.
And then came a jolt to my understanding of community: I became a father. Through the lens of fatherhood, I came to see quickly how organically tied we as a family were to the community, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania generally, and the neighborhood in which we lived. Those natural links between our family’s functioning and the community’s viability went both ways: the community’s quality depended in very specific ways on how we parents handled our roles, and the kids’ growth depended on the community’s diligent nurturance.
With our four young kids, buttressed by that understanding of the family’s and community’s mutual dependence, we moved to Oak Park in 1996.
I see in Oak Park today that optimistic fire like Teilhard’s — the belief that the community is destined to move toward richer blends of racial and cultural diversity that celebrate differences, and yet mix them into new, working forms of togetherness.
Our boundary and interchange with Berwyn are different now; our municipal neighbor south of Roosevelt Road has crafted its own recipes for openness.
On our side of 12th Street, there is plenty of love for our common place, even as there is also ongoing struggle over how to remove barriers to full participation in the community’s success. Family life is diverse and strong here, with new, inventive forms of productive home activity emerging, some of them unexpectedly spawned by the recent pandemic. Our kids learn how a good community deals with such challenges as they grow up here.
And I am grateful to continue to learn about “community” many years after I left home and first started thinking about it.
Oneness and differentness continue to shape new, emergent forms.
Rich Kordesh grew up in Berwyn and has been a longtime resident of Oak Park.