I've been taking a course on medieval monastic history this semester, and I've learned so much from it. There are a ton of names and dates to remember, of course, but the professor also brings a lot of storytelling into his lectures and finds a way to make it more "human interest" than some history classes would be. Early on in the semester, he was explaining to us that the great, opulent monastery of Cluny used to provide dinners to the local peasants, and that records show that on an average night, they would serve 200 sides of bacon to their neighbors. 

The late Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke to over two thousand people at Spirit Rock Center in California in October 1993, on the importance of community in one’s practice: