Deresiewicz began teaching and was unhappy with how his classes were going. He felt that he wasn't provoking his students to learn the way a professor he venerated had done for him. That professor asked his students deceptively simple questions like what it meant to identify with a protagonist and forced them to realize how little they knew about some subjects. When Deresiewicz read 'Northanger Abbey' about Catherine Morland who first learns various bad lessons in how to behave in society from siblings John and Isabella Thorpe, he was struck by the friend Catherine makes later, Henry Tilney. Henry made Catherine come to realizations she wouldn't have otherwise by forcing her to reexamine her preconceived ideas, much like Deresiewicz's professor. "That's when I realized.... what I was doing wrong as a teacher," Deresiewicz wrote. "What made my professor such a great teacher was not that he was brilliant, or that he had read everything – though he was, and he had – but that he forced us to think for ourselves, just as Henry did to Catherine."
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.
