Skip to footer

Readers write: student homework, life sentence for Boston bomber, fossil fuels divestment,

Letters to the editor for the May 25, 2015, weekly magazine.

|
Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor
Xavier Cattelona works on homework in the room he shares with his brother in Hillsdale, New Jersey, in 2010.

Students: Do your own homework
Regarding the May 11 story “The homework crunch: Is it too much?”: Why are parents calling homework hotlines? Children should be doing their own homework – on their own. All of this parental involvement is not healthy for student growth. Parents need to support their students, not be overly involved. Support does not mean calling homework hotlines themselves.
Elaine Baker
Morrisville, N.C.

Life sentence for Boston bomber
Regarding the May 4 Monitor’s View “Why Boston bomber Tsarnaev deserves a life sentence”: The answer is simple. Because he’s a human being. No one has the moral right to purposefully take the life of a fellow human. That is equally true for a government representing its citizenry. We, as a race, preserve our humanity by preserving the lives of others, including criminals. Americans execute our own humaneness when we execute a person via state or federal capital punishment cases. Mercy for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would provide one additional deterrent not mentioned in your editorial: It would help stop the decivilizing effect the death penalty has upon the collective conscience of our entire nation.
Lise Glaser
Tulsa, Okla.

The ‘why’ of fossil fuels divestment
Regarding the May 11 Briefing, “Behind a new push for divestment”: Robert Stavins’s argument is specious that divestment from fossil fuel holdings is not valid on moral grounds. That argument is based on a fallacious conceptual partitioning that denies the fundamental interconnectedness of everything that affects the human condition. Precisely because climate change is a scientific, economic, and political challenge, it is a moral issue. Having divested my accounts from fossil fuels, I enjoy the moral satisfaction of noninvolvement in economic activity that damages Earth, as well as better performance of my investments, and freedom from uncertainty as regulations prohibiting the burning of fossil fuels kick in.
William H. Cutler
Union City, Calif.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Readers write: student homework, life sentence for Boston bomber, fossil fuels divestment,
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Readers-Respond/2015/0523/Readers-write-student-homework-life-sentence-for-Boston-bomber-fossil-fuels-divestment
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe