Every so often during the school day, Cummings would suggest a walk to get both her and Alice out of the house and planned that the walk would be a time to review concepts they'd been discussing in classes. Educational topics would be reviewed, but other subjects came up as well, wrote Cummings. "On these hikes, we've talked about our criminal lack of closet space, divorce, the enviable hair of Golden Retrievers, religious differences and how to handle them with relatives over holiday meals, my inability to remember to bring a bottle of water for our hike and the larger issue of autonomy (which means Alice can remember to pack her own water-bottle), the death penalty, the likelihood of our adding a French Bulldog to our family, the electoral college, and countless other things," she wrote. "It should be noted here that it was Alice walking me through the workings of the Electoral College. Again."
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.
