Reader recommendation: Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution

Monitor readers share their favorite picks.

Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution by Christopher Hill is a detailed account of how individuals with independent views took on an undisciplined authoritarian government and won. At the beginning, the state effectively controlled the print media. Eventually publishing became cheaper and a middle class with increasing prosperity could buy reading material that supported individual and family life. The authoritarian state and its intrusions in private life declined as individual freedoms and prosperity thrived.

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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.”

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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.

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