Before she left on her trip, Smith attended a screening of the 2005 "Pride and Prejudice" film that was populated by three very enthusiastic audience members. "The three treated the outing like a trip to a Steelers game, shouting encouragement and insults at the appropriate spots," she wrote. "I'm usually the first person to shush noisy viewers, but it was worth the ticket price to hear them respond to the story with such unreserved gusto. 'Who... does he think he is?!' barked the woman when Darcy snubs Lizzy at the dance. 'Ha! Guess she told you, buddy!' hooted one of the men when Lizzy takes him down a peg or two a few scenes later... Imagine the surprise of all three when Darcy reappears to give it one more try – they were so happy they clapped and hollered. I felt like hugging them."
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.
