Cummings decided to attend a conference about the philosophy of unschooling, which advocates letting children learn through everyday activities like playing with other children rather than through the usual educational curriculum. She was struck with how much freedom the children at the conference enjoyed, including being able to go back to the hotel rooms by themselves and to interrupt their parents in the middle of the conference. Ultimately, however, she was stricken with guilt by the discussion on valuing time with your child. "I skipped the group lunch," Cummings wrote of the conference. "Partially out of sorrow for all that I hadn't provided my daughter and partially because I saw the daily schedule promised 'Pizza n' Karaoke!' which combined two of my worst fears: mandatory public singing and the frivolous amputation of the word 'and.' I hid in the solarium for the lunch hour, making a meal out of Saltines and a peppermint I found in my purse. Thus restored, I dashed off to another meeting about.... well, frankly, I have no idea. My notes from the lecture read: 'Strive for something unlike a results-based paradigm!!!' underlined three times."
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.
