All From the Editors

What happens to students who come from low-income backgrounds but catapult into the world of high-powered universities? For many, it is intensely unsettling, forcing them to bestride two worlds.

The danger of dismissing this fascination with video games is not just being thought of as uncool. It is missing where young people are living their lives.

Staff writer Harry Bruinius’s cover story this week is an extraordinary look at the graces and trials of the attempt to forgive. It charts the stories of two mothers, Mörch and Jolyn Hopson, whose lives intertwined in the most searing way.

Readers without a subscription to our digital Monitor Daily edition will be limited to five free articles on CSMonitor.com per month beginning May 8.

The solutions to entrenched problems are almost never obvious or easy. So it’s no wonder that potential solutions aren’t one-size-fits-all.

Politics, at its best, is the real-time experiment to find out how that promise is most practically and effectively fulfilled in different places and times. 

The stories by Stacy Teicher Khadaroo in Louisiana and Fred Weir in Russia in this week’s issue are about the search for reconciliation. They are about injustice and inhumanity on two different continents and on a scale unthinkable.

Studies have long shown that human beings are resistant to information that upsets their worldview. But why do we appear so prone to that temptation now? 

Sport can ennoble us, demanding that we rebel against our limitations, find joy and fellowship in the mutual pursuit of excellence, and express grace in loss. The Olympics do not always reach this height, but perhaps no other event unites the world in so rigorously demanding that its participants aspire to a higher ideal.

These schools have made remarkable gains, but they have done so by mustering every ounce of ingenuity and collective will.

Sitting on a park bench in Beijing, moved to tears by the memories that came flooding back to her as she watched an amateur opera, our reporter saw other core values expressed by a gentleman who sat next to her: harmony, civility, friendship.

In the spirit of evolving the Monitor Daily toward the clearest statement of the Monitor’s mission, changes are coming to the Christian Science Perspective starting on Jan. 22.

As president, Donald Trump clearly wields huge power. What he does matters, in many cases enormously. But it’s also fair to say that, according to the vision of the Founders, a fixation on Trump – pro or con – is a backward way of addressing America’s challenges.

Is the Monitor biased toward a sense of unity? Toward a sense that, amid all the diversities of opinions, races, and nations, we can find a common humanity that more strongly binds us? Yes.

Silicon Valley wasn’t really just about technology. It was America’s ideas factory. It was about problem-solving. Technology simply happens to be the most powerful and effective means to that end. 

On Nov. 30, David Cook hosted his final breakfast. It was a milestone for the Monitor and for the Breakfast. 

In the cyberworld, knowledge itself is power and is countered by knowledge. Technology is the accessory. In the case of hacking elections, the internet provides a vast and dark new space for countries to carry out the age-old design of tampering with rivals.

Not every idea will work. Most won’t change the world all by themselves. But all point to a mental diligence that refuses to sit still and accept the problems of the present as unsolvable.

For generations, much of America’s opportunity was in its boundless rural landscapes – its rich soil and coal seams. But as that shifts, a new commodity is coming forward as even more valuable to the future of small towns from Storm Lake, Iowa, to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: new thinking.

Faith traditions have recognized that charity is more than simply the act of giving. It involves a deeper realization of the connections that bind us all. In giving, we receive. In loving without expectation of return, we learn what love is.