Three women were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for their roles in promoting peace and democracy. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karaman, and Liberian women’s rights activist Leymah Gbowee were the first women to win the prize since 2004. Ms. Karaman is the first Arab woman to win the prize and, in her early 30s, she is the youngest recipient in the award’s history.
“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of societies,” the Nobel Peace Prize announcement reads.
The majority of recipients of the 110-year-old award have been men, and many view the committee’s decision to honor three women with the $1.5 million prize as highlighting the growing prominence of women in peace and democracy-building wordwide.
“You give concrete meaning to the Chinese proverb which says that ‘women hold up half of the sky,’” Norwegian Nobel Committee president Thorbjoern Jagland told the recipients.
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.
