Unger took his two-year-old son, Zeke, grocery shopping and had let him out of the stroller while he tried to fold it back up when Zeke suddenly yelled, "Dog!" "'Big dog,' Zeke babbled on," Unger wrote. "'Bark woof.' I looked toward the spot where Zeke was pointing with two outstretched hands. 'It my dog,' he said, toddling into the street. What I saw on the low rise across the street from our house was not Zeke's dog. In fact, it wasn't a dog at all. Instead, a polar bear sauntered from right to left, sniffing its way along the hillside toward Ladoon's Castle.... I felt oddly unthreatened, though not nearly as blasé as Zeke, who was bobbling across the street and directly toward the animal. Still, it seemed prudent to get some walls between the bear and us as quickly as possible. I grabbed Zeke and tossed him inside, abandoning our stroller with its tempting cache of fragrant groceries." The two went inside and watched the bear, who soon beat a quick retreat when a truck full of tourists went by.
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.
