Ashford unexpectedly became the warden in charge of a wartime nursery, where families would drop off children while the parents or grandparents worked. She said her days became almost impossibly full of activities. "A typical day went something like this," she wrote. "Oversee the bathing and dressing of thirty children. Prepare and feed breakfast. Administer cod-liver oil in a storm of protest. Comb thirty heads for nits. Check children for lice. Apply cream for impetigo. Prepare prams for babies' walks, toddlers' playtime. Boil wash woollies, nappies, cot sheets, and clothes. Fill bottles, prepare lunch, serve lunch, clear up. Get children down for naps, break up fights, clean up. Order weekly food, manage rations, issue means-tested invoices and nursery bills. Mending, shopping, administration. Teatime. Story time. Play time. Watch out for doodlebug rockets flying over head. Change thirty children into day clothes, oversee home time. Scrub nursery from top to bottom. Draw blackout curtains and lock up."
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.
