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Readers Respond: 6 views on Common Ground, Common Good

Many readers have responded with praise and gratitude for the new Common Ground, Common Good feature in Commentary, and for Sen. Olympia Snowe's inaugural column. We've collected some of their remarks here.

2. Common ground in Maine

Bravo on your new feature in the Monitor’s Commentary section called, “Common Ground, Common Good”! And the first commentary by Olympia Snowe of Maine most certainly hit the mark about the necessity to find common ground for the common good. It struck me as quite serendipitous, therefore, when I read about the long-term and amazing struggle of several public and private parties in Maine with very different agendas as they came together to revitalize the life of the Penobscot River against all odds of it ever happening. The report by Virginia Wright was published in the October issue of Down East, the Magazine of Maine.

Successful collaborations like this one need to be made known to all thinking people in positions to get things done for the common good. It deserves to be celebrated as to what can be accomplished when caring people commit to working together to solve problems.

Thanks for continuing to supply the concerned public with fresh and thought provoking ideas on how to most effectively and peacefully benefit the world’s citizens.

Nancy Root

Lansdale, Penn.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

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