For those that only heard of East Ridge or heard about East Ridge or never heard of East Ridge at all, these texts and postings will appear as only a case study into the moral derangement of a community with the highest intentions and expectations that led to its eventual disintegration.  But for those who wish to observe and study moral degeneracy from high ideals in an encapsulated laboratory there is a wealth of insightful experience available. 
Perhaps there are clues or analogies to the modern cultural moral and religious disintegration. Why address this topic at all? How can there be any interest in this topic? There is herein a great opportunity for a deeper self examination, a deeper insight into higher principles and the possibility of self-questioning that should not be overlooked. If we try to examine this phenomenon at a secular level or at a level of personal fault or victim-hood, then we are lost and in danger of loosing even the knowledge that we are lost.  I will not proffer a conclusion, at best I can only offer material that might help one to form the proper and vital self-question. To that end I will bring to Gunlap 70 those texts, sources and teachers that bear on this subject and may help the reader to form a more objective set of questions. But can we not gain some possible explanation of the moral and religious degeneration in American culture by a view into this micro laboratory? Does not the loss of ‘Sobornost’ , (See Community Page) the corruption of leadership, the long term complicity with moral degeneracy and error, the final lifting and removal of the proclamation (Bultmann’s term, that may be applied to the Program in some degree and scale); does not this resonate with what is happening in American culture right on our door step? The violence is characterized by Patrick Buchanan “We are a formerly Christian society in an advanced state of decomposition.{…} Before the Death of God and repeal of the Ten Commandments, in those dark old days, the 1950’s, atrocities common now were almost nonexistent.”Patrick Buchanan’s Blog.  It is as if an unhappy variant of the parable of Solomon’s wisdom (1 Kings, 3:16 – 27) with the two women disputing over the child, ended with both parties being content with the destruction of the living child needed reenactment in community.
To start? Let’s start with ‘First Things First’.  A look into First Principles and those texts on the Tenets and Principles of Community, which may not necessarily be subordinate to First Principles, but can be super-ordinate thereto, will provide a starting point and a right perspective.  But if you must address the superficial level, then I recommend The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis. The texts below help form a back drop for self-questioning. Read the first three posts (in list below); notice the fire of holding the two ideas (on Obedience) in balance. There is the fire and trial of hard questioning. Without the recognition of that burning questioning there will be trouble setting the questions in the proper context. Note what Jacob Needleman offers through Father Sylvan: “Let even one or two people begin by recognizing in their hearts that Truth is the sustained consciousness of Error. (….) May even one or two people understand what takes place within a man in the state of Questioning himself.” **
** Needleman, Jacob. Lost Christianity (Kindle Locations 3045-3047). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
And an often quoted note on redemption
“Orthodoxy teaches that whole-heartedness, or healing of the heart, cannot be achieved by imagining that we can triumph over the heart of stone. It is fundamental Christian belief that the devil cannot create anything, that evil in us is actually a distortion of something originally good, and cannot be thrown away but must be redeemed: the good must be reclaimed from evil. If we throw away the deepest evil, we also throw out the deepest good, and live by a “good” of our own invention which is only a sublimated or inverted evil.”
James and Myfanwy Moran, The Battle for Person in the Heart, Inner Journey, Christian
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