If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. 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’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. 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. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest.

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “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. 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”:

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