One of the most inspiring efforts in Olympic history occurred in the equestrian discipline of dressage, in which riders put horses through their paces in a series of movements, such as canter, trot, and various walking steps. Simply sitting and riding a horse was an incredible accomplishment for Denmark’s Lis Hartel at the 1952 Helsinki Games. After battling polio, she was paralyzed from her knees down and had to be helped onto and off her horse. Even so, she won the silver medal in the first Olympic dressage competition in which women and men faced off. During the medals presentation, she was assisted onto the podium by Sweden’s Henri Saint Cyr, the gold medalist, in a Kleenex moment for spectators. Hartel went on to repeat as the silver medalist at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
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.
