Has anyone heard of the recent study by the Dartmouth Medical School, the Institute for American Values and the YMCA of the USA that humans are "hard-wired to connect?"

A lot of the problems with children that are surfacing more and more come from a "deficit of connectedness." The brain seems to function and develop best when a child is connected to a community that supplies it with moral and spiritual meaning. In other words, the brain is made for a transcendent framework of meaning.

Sounds like community and metanarrative. Of course, you can't have one without the other. Got to have a community to preserve and pass on the metanarrative. Got to have a metanarrative to have a community - otherwise there is no common-unity.

This has got to be part of the reason adolescent and preadolescent depression, behavior problems, etc. cross racial and social lines. Some of the most disconnected kids are in the burbs - maybe that's why things like Columbine happen. Hmm..

Peace