Coston recalled a couple who owned a beagle named Branson who were devoted to the dog. "Both spoke in quiet, relaxed tones, seldom raising their voices," he wrote of the couple. "Neither was excitable beyond [a] quick and easy chuckle." Their dog Branson was their opposite. "We always had advance warning that he was coming, since Branson displayed another common beagle trait," Coston wrote. "As soon as the Kovacs put him in the car, he commenced to baying, a term that perfectly conveys the action... This mournful tune could be heard faintly at first, then more loudly, as the Kovacs' car neared the clinic. It reached an earsplitting crescendo as they eased into a parking space in front of the office. Listening to the racket, you expected to look out the window and find a pack of hunting dogs surrounding a treed raccoon. Instead, you just saw Branson in the backseat."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
