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Editor of The Christian Science Monitor to step down

Marshall Ingwerson, editor of the 108-year-old news organization, announced he's taking a job as chief executive of The Principia, a nonprofit Christian Science organization that runs a college in Illinois and pre-K-12 school in Missouri. 

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Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
Marshall Ingwerson, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, on December 12, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts.
  • By The Christian Science Board of Directors

Dear Friends,

We want to let you know about an upcoming change at The Christian Science Monitor. Marshall Ingwerson has asked to step down as the Monitor’s Editor in the next few months to take another important position. The only thing that makes it easier to let Marshall go is to hear why he’s going, so here’s what he says about his new step: 

 “I have been Editor of the Monitor for three years, Managing Editor for nearly 15 years before that, and a Monitor journalist overall for (wow!) 37 years. Let me add that to this very day – this very moment, I love my job, the team I’m on, and where we’re going with this enterprise.  Nonetheless, a rare opportunity has presented itself to serve as the Chief Executive of The Principia, the nonprofit organization that runs the college from which I graduated and a pre-kindergarten to grade 12 school in St. Louis (Missouri, USA). Fascinating and important conversations are happening there about teaching and learning as well as the larger questions of how to live and help heal the world.”

Marshall has served as Editor at a time when journalism is undergoing tremendous and rapid change. The mission Mary Baker Eddy gave the Monitor – “to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent” and “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” has never been more essential ("The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," p. 353). Marshall recently described the paper’s core work as “changing how people see the world – eroding fear and despair with a credible sense of possibility and agency and dissolving cynicism and hate by bridging divides with understanding. In short, a journalism of hope and love. Credible, fact-based, and fair.”

We are tremendously grateful for the deep commitment, wisdom, and spiritual sense Marshall has brought to this work and for the progress the Monitor has made under his stewardship. He will continue as Editor until the Board of Directors makes a new appointment in coming months. As Christmas draws near, we can trust that the light that is always coming into the world will continue to spread the Science that operates unspent, and provide all that is needed for blessing humanity.  

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

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