On the first day of school, Danza asked each student to write about a personal experience they'd had. One student named Al never turned in the assignment – something that Danza mentioned to Al's mother at a parent-teacher conference. The day after the conference, Al came in with the assignment. He had written a story about playing a game of basketball with other teenagers in his neighborhood. One of the members of the losing team left and came back with a gun and was threatening the winners. Another player also pulled a gun. Al crawled to safety and ran. "My reality as a kid was a tough neighborhood, but nobody was getting shot at," Danza wrote. "The gap between my life and Al's widens even further. Maybe stories like this are what his mother meant when she said he has a lot going on. I remember now that when I called to request the conference, her first words were 'Is he okay?'"
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.
