South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, an amputee who runs using carbon-fiber blades in lieu of his missing lower legs, won a legal battle to gain entry to the London Olympics. The man they called the Blade Runner thus became the first double amputee to compete in the Olympic Games. He finished second in his opening 400-meter heat but last in the semis, then went on to run in the Paralympics that followed the London Olympics. In a show of just how competitive the Paralympics has become, Pistorius failed to win the 200 meters, an event in which he was unbeaten, and also lost his 100-meter title. In the former race, he questioned the dimensions of the equipment used by the winner, Brazil’s Alan Oliveira, who stormed from behind to win at the wire. The officials upheld the result, but Pistorius’s charges of unfairness may point up the difficulty in achieving a totally level playing field in Paralympic events.
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.
