Readers Respond: 6 views on Common Ground, Common Good

Many readers have responded with praise and gratitude for the new Common Ground, Common Good feature in Commentary, and for Sen. Olympia Snowe's inaugural column. We've collected some of their remarks here.

5. Cooperation deserves more attention

I, too, have been very frustrated with only hearing reporting on where people are not getting along. The myriad ways that people are working together, in contrast, gets no attention. Hence, I was quite pleased to see this new series.

I started a website awhile back called www.modelsofunity.net. This site features case studies of people working across divides to solve collective problems in their communities. I have been keen on featuring cases that have a shelf life vs. one-off programs.

Ms. Zarrín Caldwell, Principal

Global Dreams Consulting

Columbia, Md.

5 of 6

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.

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