When Deresiewicz returned to "Persuasion," he was in the middle of writing his dissertation and friends had scattered to various jobs. He was feeling isolated, much like "Persuasion" heroine Anne Elliot. After being pressured into breaking off her engagement with the man she loved because her family thought he had no social standing, Anne was living at home with a father and sister who didn't think much of her opinion and usually belittled her. When Anne goes to a house in Lyme and sees her former fiance's group of friends, she thinks to herself that these people would have been her circle. Deresiewicz also felt that he was lacking a group of friends like he'd had in the past and when, through a mutual acquaintance, he got to know a group who often went to a house by the water, it reminded him of the circle of people Anne became acquainted with in Lyme. "Like the Harvilles, he accommodated as many friends as wanted to come, and anyone who came became a friend," Deresiewicz wrote of the house's host. "Like the Harvilles, in short, he made you feel at home."
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.
