When Deresiewicz first read "Sense and Sensibility," he says he was unimpressed with the book's message. Two sisters fall in love in the book and it was the whirlwind romance of younger sister, Marianne, and the man she first falls in love with, John Willoughby, that most impressed Deresiewicz. But the romance that Austen seemed to want the reader to root for, wrote Deresiewicz, was that between the elder sister Elinor and Edward Ferrars, a character who seemed quiet and tepid to Deresiewicz. "Elinor, meanwhile, was involved in a romance of her own – if you could call it that," Deresiewicz wrote of the plotline. But after pondering over the story again and remembering a romance he'd embarked on, which had moved quickly because it had seemed so right but then crashed and burned, he began to see what Austen had meant. "Knowing yourself, Austen taught me, is not enough," Deresiewicz wrote. "You also need to know the person you fall in love with, and despite what Marianne and I believed, this doesn't happen overnight... Elinor's way of going about things is the right one: to see a great deal of a person, to study their sentiments, to hear their opinions."
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.
