Under construction: more-connected communities

They have come from around Los Angeles - from different faiths, or no faiths at all; some 80 people - to sit in the auditorium of a private Muslim school and deliberate over a burning question:

Should "the Center for Exquisite Balance" - a small band of believers in an obscure, alternative religion - be granted a conditional permit to build a huge center for worship?

During the course of the meeting's two-hour debate, questions and accusations about religion and faith bounce around the room. Participants meet one-to-one and in small groups, discussing their own religious encounters and their experience of other faiths.

By the end of the hearing, the entire group gathers in a large circle, and each person offers the one question he or she will take away from this debate. No one offers answers to the questions, which include: How diverse is my own religious experience? Can we make judgment a positive thing? Can people of different beliefs be in the same heaven? What do we value most?

Welcome to an evening with Cornerstone Theater, a Los Angeles-based performing company that

has been using theater as a tool for community-building for the past 16 years. The "hearing" they have staged on this recent Friday evening is pure fiction. But it is also a means to an end: honest dialogue.

Cornerstone members have performed this play at several venues around the city over the past several weeks. Cast members playing roles mingle with the audience, using the play's device of a "public hearing" as a means to spark impromptu conversations and discussions among the people who've come to see the play.

Part of a festival of faith-based productions that has been in the works for three years, "Zones" has unexpectedly taken on an added urgency in the nation's post-Sept. 11 environment.

"Among the communities I've been working with, I really do feel more of a hunger, not only to make connections, but to assert those connections publicly," says Bill Rauch, the group's artistic director.

"When you ask about the impact of world events on the work we do, in terms of hope for building bridges, bridges that last," he says, "that's on our minds every single minute here at Cornerstone."

Mr. Rauch and his colleagues are not alone. All across the country, grass-roots activists, community leaders, and cultural observers are grappling with the remarkable aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks - a surging desire for connectedness and a willingness, not seen in this country for decades, to engage in civic life.

It's a change in attitude, say these activists and experts, that holds powerful possibilities for community-building and social change.

But at the same time, they warn, this sea change of sentiment could simply fade into memory if nothing is done to harness it and put it to work at both the grass-roots and national levels.

"This is where we have the opportunity to shore up civil society," says the Rev. Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. "We've demonstrated [since Sept. 11] that we can work together, that we can collaborate. Groups that didn't know each other in the past are now going to regard each other as colleagues, if not friends.

"But how do we create sustainable programs of activity that can rebuild our civil society?" he asks.

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