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New editor at The Christian Science Monitor

Christa Case Bryant is named the next editor of the news organization. She will be the second woman to hold the position in the Monitor’s 116-year history.

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Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor
Christa Case Bryant, the senior congressional correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, stands outside the Capitol in 2023. She will become editor of the Monitor in 2025.
  • By Staff

The Christian Science Board of Directors on Thursday announced the election of Christa Case Bryant as the next editor of The Christian Science Monitor.

The current editor, Mark Sappenfield, is stepping back from the position, having decided to extend his stay in Berlin, where he and his family have been living since August 2023. He will continue to work for the Monitor in a senior role.

Ms. Bryant’s love of the Monitor and its high standards has been honed through a broad portfolio of assignments at the paper, from helping to guide the CSMonitor.com website during the Monitor’s transition to a web-first publication to Jerusalem bureau chief to senior congressional correspondent. While covering Congress, Ms. Bryant won two major awards for political journalism: the National Press Foundation’s Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress in 2022 and the 2023 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington Correspondence. She is also an alumna of the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard University.

“Christa is the very best of everything that makes the Monitor unique – a deep commitment to fairness, a sense that good journalism can unite instead of divide, and a wonderful understanding of the Monitor’s connection to Christian Science,” says Mr. Sappenfield.

In recognizing Mr. Sappenfield’s eight years as editor, the Board of Directors wrote in a letter to staff and church members: “We are very grateful for Mark’s editorial direction of the Monitor over the past eight years and his continuing commitment to the Monitor’s work.”

As editor, Mr. Sappenfield has helped to develop and produce the Monitor’s “values projects,” including The Respect Project, Finding Resilience, and Rebuilding Trust.

The exact date of the transition has not yet been fixed but is expected to be in the first few months of next year. Mr. Sappenfield will remain the editor until that date. Ms. Bryant will be the second woman in the position.

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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.

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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