Brad Rourke’s Blog
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A Personal Mission of Agency
Each year-end I look back and reflect. I look at all areas of my life: family, professional, personal, spiritual, physical, financial. Across all of the major areas of my life, this has been a pivotal year of conceptual progress for me. I developed great clarity on my personal mission. And three ideas that began to…
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Brad’s White Bread Recipe
If you want to feel like Super Dad, just bake a loaf of bread for the family. Your home will fill with the sweet smell of a bakery, and will feel especially inviting.
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My Dreamscape
There is a city I visit repeatedly in my dreams. Rather, a place in a city, and a route to that city. The place. It is a transport station, elevated in a sort of castle-like building on a point. It reminds me of the Flatiron building if it were a castle. Along one side it…
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Two Competing Mythologies
Many people speak of a “tribalism” that seems to be on the rise in America and in our communities these days. By this they appear to mean, for the most part, a bipolar set of group identities, locked in conflict with one another and whose boundaries are based in large part on antipathy toward the…
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Local Democratic Governance
This is more than just funny. It is a wonderful example of the predominant institutional-centered thinking when it comes to communities. Watch this, and take every word deadly seriously — this is what I am delighted to try to undermine daily, by propagating a greater sense of agency by people in communities.
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Three Problems of Modern Life
Public life is beset by three problems. Each is an extreme expression of a fundamentally human trait, exacerbated and amplified by some aspect of modernity. Anonymous Atomization. It is a normal aspect of the human condition that we struggle to really take others into account as anything more than actors in our own dramas. Our…
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Notes and Comments from Rockville Town Square and Town Center Community Meeting, 10/9/2018
I attended a community meeting (10/9/2018) to discuss Rockville Town Square and Town Center this evening. Many thanks to Mayor Newton, the City Council, city staff, the Rockville Chamber of Commerce, Federal Realty Investment Trust, and VisArts for making it happen. It was an important meeting — hopefully the first of many. So many important…
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Finding Tension
One of the things that gets in the way of making sound collective judgments is that, too often, we avoid facing the tensions inherent in the problems we share. When we sit down to talk about what to do about some community problem, we avoid tensions and indeed we actively seek to remove them when…
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The Pioneers of Courage
Independence Day is my favorite holiday of the year. The day we declared ourselves a free people. Our efforts were imperfect then, our freedom parsimoniously shared, our efforts remained imperfect through the decades, and they are imperfect now. We have much progress to make. But I relish this day, as I meditate on the courage…
Brad Rourke 