Dickens is reported to have once told fellow novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky that all of his good characters were the people that he wished that he were, while his bad characters were the ones that he really felt himself to be. Probably no character better illustrates the possibility of finding the good and the bad in the same person than Sidney Carton, the dissipated English barrister who becomes the hero of "A Tale of Two Cities," sacrificing himself so the woman he loves can be with the man she loves. Among the most famous lines in English literature (along with the opening lines of "A Tale of Two Cities": "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...") are Carton's parting words: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
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.
