bridging = making contact with "other" than self

Putnam distinguishes between bonding (with in groups) and bridging (between them).  That is probably too simple a way of putting it, but the point holds that a democracy needs ways to link together people who are not already in sympathy with each other so that we can see the larger needs and so that we can become willing to make the adjustments required to get those things accomplished.  Being in touch with "others" gets us (me) outside ourselves; and sometimes it expands our sense of who is included in "we."

Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on this, though in the context of neighbor love rather than of democracy, in her book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.

Contra dancing

Of course, religious communities are not the only communities in which neighbor love is practiced.  In the small rural community where I live, people also count on community theater, contra dancing, quilting circles, book clubs, singing groups, Rotary Club meetings, and even a cockfight or two to keep kinship bonds strong.  The only problem with any of these groups, as far as I can tell, is that they  tend to attract like-minded people, the same way most churches do.  However different the people in them may be, and however often they may tangle with one another, they still share central convictions, commitments, values, or disciplines.  On the one hand, this is what keeps them together.  On the other hand, this is what keeps people out.

at the grocery store

Meanwhile, there are people in all of our communities who do not belong to any of the same groups we do.  They do not live thirty-two miles away, either.  Some of them live right down the street.  Some of them stand right in front of us at the gas station, the post office, or the grocery store, where they remain largely invisible to us.  Our community with them is human community--such a broad connection that it is easy to overlook--and yet who could be better equipped to pop the  locks on our prisons than people in whom we see nothing of ourselves?  (pp. 93-94)