Political scientist Carsten Frerk estimates the German church's net wealth is around $104 billion. That, he says, gives it the political power to snuff out efforts to change the tax relationship with the state. It's a position shared by the country's second-largest Christian entity, the Evangelical Church in Germany, whose tax revenues were around $6 billion in 2011. "We have the very extraordinary situation in Germany that the Catholic and Lutheran churches are equally strong. They are strong enough to be able to say to the parties, if you even think of making any changes, we will strike back now... I think that the relation of state and church won't change at all," Frerk says. Archbishop Robert Zolltisch, the head of the German Bishops' Conference, told NPR: "In Germany, the church is a community of faith which coexists alongside the legal system... The two cannot be separated."
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.
