The first job Ashford got was helping a mother, Mrs. Ravenshere, take care of her home and her two young sons. Ashford watched how Ravenshere's affection for the boys affected them and how confident it made them. "'You have a natural ability with those boys,' I told her one morning after she'd waved them off to school. 'Do I?' she said, looking surprised. 'I don't think I do very much at all. I'm only their mother.' Only their mother! Throughout the rest of my career I heard that come from so many women's mouths. It's always said in an apologetic tone, as if all of the million things they do daily for their offspring happen quite by chance. I wish mothers would stop putting themselves down so much. All mothers are quite brilliant in my eyes and nine times out of ten don't realize the sacrifices they undertake or the powerful contributions they make."
Mark Sappenfield
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.
