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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.

6. Improving public conversation

I've been enjoying your "Common Ground, Common Good" series and hope it continues. I also hope it extends its coverage to the many public conversation approaches developed by discussion practitioners throughout the US.

What we do at the Interactivity Foundation is to develop materials that may serve as "starting points" for public conversation. Our guides do not put forth "recommendations," but rather pose some contrasting possibilities that can help folks get past some of the arguments.

We do this in the hope that discussions along such lines will lead to consideration of more options, including some that provide common ground. While we are still learning what works and what does not in terms of starting points for helpful public conversation, our initial results are encouraging.

There is also a diverse body of public conversation work occurring under the umbrella of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). 

Dennis Boyer

Wisconsin

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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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