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Reader recommendation: Blessed Unrest

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

  • By Erin Plum, Yellow Springs, Ohio

I just finished Paul Hawken's 2007 book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. This incredibly thorough and thoughtful book describes a worldwide movement that has recently taken shape – a movement not led by one person or ideology, but a sustainably minded movement made up of individuals and groups who are working to heal our world through environmental conservation and restoration, social justice, and indigenous rights. Hawken explains the historical, cultural, and environmental context of this "blessed unrest" of a movement, and I learned plenty about the people, businesses, and groups who have and are impacting this movement, for better or worse. The book takes an honest look at the state of the world and highlights the good that's happening. I'm now more excited to be part of the change!

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Mark Sappenfield
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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.

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