Common Good Collective

Reader

This Reader is an expression of Common Good Collective, a vision for an alternative way, rooted in the act of eliminating economic isolation, the significance of place, and the structure of belonging. Whether you come at this from a place of economics, social good, or faith, we hope these reflections help orient your day in fresh, provocative, courageous ways. And most importantly, we hope these lead you into the sharing of gifts in particular communities—into co-creating a common good.

We read hundreds of articles and select the best ones for you by sending them to your inbox on Thursday.
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Reader, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind

In just a few weeks, the United States will mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. In this remarkable story, Jennifer Senior traces one family who lost a loved one on that day. She details the grief of that family, which looks so much like the grief of the whole country: despair, hope, resilience, unexplainable turns to conspiracy theory, the difficulty of love, truth-telling and its avoidance, and the complexities of remembering.

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind: Grief and Conspiracy 20 Years After 9/11
By Jennifer Senior

Bobby McIlvaine, with his parents, Helen and Bob Sr., at his Princeton graduation in 1997. Bobby’s body was found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. (Danna Singer; original photo courtesy of the McIlvaine family)

When Bobby McIlvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. He’d kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things—longings, observations, frustrations—while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction.

The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. But the diaries told a different kind of story. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap—philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends.

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A Hidden Resource

One overlooked public space in many cities and towns: the alley. This four-part series on the history and the future of the alley helps engage the imagination about how these overlooked spaces might help transform our neighborhoods.

The American Alley, Part 1: A Hidden Resource
By Thomas Dougherty

This article is the first in a four-part series we launched this week on American alleyways as promising sites for incremental infill development. The author, Thomas Dougherty, will be the guest on Thursday’s episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. You can also download the e-book we created for this series for free, which features bonus content not shown on the website!

It is rare to find a street in America that does not seem to be almost wholly oriented around the movement of cars from one point to another. The street understood as part of the public realm seems to be forever lost, a thing of the past. There are political and cultural reasons for this, and a long history of how this came to be, well told by authors including Andres Duany (co-author of Suburban Nation), and James Kunstler (The Geography of Nowhere). Perhaps the most fundamental reason for this, though, is that most American streets—both historic and modern—are very wide, at least compared to streets of historic European towns and cities.

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 Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Poetry for Building Community, Significance Of Place Permalink

“Appalachian Elegy”

“listen little sister / angels make their hope here / in these hills” Writer and poet bell hooks explores in this poem the significance of the Appalachian hills to generations of people — young and old, alive and ascended. This nurturing magic is to be appreciated by our gentle keeping of the land they, and we, call home.

Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)
By bell hooks

1.

hear them cry
the long dead
the long gone
speak to us
from beyond the grave
guide us
that we may learn
all the ways
to hold tender this land
hard clay direct
rock upon rock
charred earth
in time
strong green growth
will rise here
trees back to life
native flowers
pushing the fragrance of hope
the promise of resurrection

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