“The South’s Summer is the heart of Summer. Those ribbony afternoons of childhood (it is the children who stir in afternoons) live in our memory; I think the memory of every Southerner lies fixed in summertime. From the beginning of our lives, it seems, we knew the big, slow month-after-month turning of sights and sounds and scents, the kaleidoscope of pleasures in the duress of heat – the swimming of ice in china pitchers of tea or lemonade, ceiling fans wheeling on porches, punkahs in the oldest houses in stately back-and-forth above the long table, fans in the hand, church fans, party fans, silk and feather and ivory fans, old ladies black fans, children’s fans, on chains that went around the neck.”
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.
