2019
December
20
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

December 20, 2019
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Linda Feldmann
Washington Bureau Chief

Today, we look at millennials and authentic Christmas, the ethics of alien life, a secret food bank for farmworkers, a chat about the values of “Star Wars,” and finding meaning in Tuba Christmas.

At the end of impeachment week, it’s tempting to feel that the nation is hopelessly divided – especially as we head into an election year that could get ugly. But let’s consider a counternarrative. Around the country, dialogues aimed at understanding the “red-blue divide” are springing up. Monitor reporter Henry Gass wrote about one such effort in Wimberley, Texas, organized by a local chapter of the Better Angels alliance.

I reached out to an old friend of the Monitor, Tom Smerling, the Better Angels coordinator for Maryland, to see how he’s feeling post-impeachment. Mr. Smerling told me something surprising: Getting American conservatives and liberals together for dialogue today is harder than it was to get Israelis and Palestinians to talk back in the day, when he was an advocate for Middle East diplomacy.

“The U.S. work is harder, in part because we were one step removed from the Arab-Israeli conflict, on the outside looking in,” Mr. Smerling says. In the U.S. today, “in this polarized conflict, we are ‘inside the fishbowl.’” 

Yet Mr. Smerling is hopeful. “Reds” and “blues” are willing to sit down together, and look within themselves at the stereotypes they hold about others and why others hold stereotypes about them. 

At a recent Better Angels dialogue in Rockville, Maryland, he says, “you could feel the sigh of relief when the other side shared a moment of self-criticism and humility.” 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A deeper look

Riley Robinson/The Christian Science Monitor
Luke Richardson (left) and his brother Brady help cut down their family’s Christmas tree at a farm in Hillsburgh, Ontario.
JPL-Caltech/NASA
This illustration shows what the TRAPPIST-1 star system might look like from a vantage point near planet TRAPPIST-1f (at right). A new European space telescope has joined the field hunting for habitable worlds beyond our solar system.

Difference-maker

Tony Avelar/Special to The Christian Science Monitor
A woman carries a bag of produce as her daughter follows behind. A monthly clandestine food distribution in Watsonville, California, helps farmworkers make ends meet when they lose the regular income of harvest season.

The Chat

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Essay


The Monitor's View

Ted S. Warren/AP/File
Tents used by homeless people are shown on either side of a sidewalk in Seattle in 2018. Washington Governor Jay Inslee said Dec. 18 that he proposes spending more than $300 million to add 2,100 shelter beds and provide other help to combat homelessness.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Andreea Alexandru/AP
A child smiles before performing in a Christmas show for children in care in Bucharest, Romania, Dec. 18, 2019. Romania has more than 50,000 children in state care, according to recent statistics.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Some special holiday content is coming your way during Christmas week. Get those headphones out and get ready to spend a week with Monitor writers and editors.

Today, we have one last holiday treat for you for your weekend: Staff writer Sara Miller Llana spent a day in the lab of a scientist who’s spent 40 years trying to create the perfect Christmas tree

More issues

2019
December
20
Friday
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