Near the end of the week Baldwin and his wife Rachel had arrived, they encountered two problems: they got bad colds, and their stove broke. A repairman was called for the stove, and the repairman wrote what needed to be done in large block letters for Baldwin: "CRÈME POUR LA PLAQUE." Baldwin was baffled. "I said quietly, 'Where do I find the cream for the plaque?'" Baldwin wrote. "But he'd already walked out." Meanwhile, a friend who lived in the city told them the solution to their colds was honey. "'Make sure you look for the sticker that says the bees are from Paris, that's important,'" the friend told them. After having eaten a lot of Parisian honey, Baldwin and his wife went to a store and got the prescribed cream for the stove. "Turns out the cream worked," Baldin wrote. "Our coils didn't conduct electricity when they lacked moisturizer.... and the same day, just when we couldn't face one more spoonful of honey, our flu vanished. We lived in Paris, Paris being not only the city of milk and honey, but also the city where milk and honey were solutions."
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.
