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Readers write: China’s role in the world, insight into agriculture in the US, finding the Cartagena reef, covering new ground

Letters to the editor for the Aug. 6, 2018 weekly magazine.

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Valeria Pizarro
The Varadero reef in Cartagena, Colombia
  • By Esther de Ipolyi Monitor reader
  • Daniel Block Monitor reader
  • Grace Lorentzen Monitor reader
  • David Walton Monitor reader

China’s role in the world

Howard LaFranchi’s May 29 Monitor Daily piece, “In North Korea talks, what role is China seeking?,” is superb. It’s the best I have seen written on the subject. This is exactly what I expect from The Christian Science Monitor and especially from Mr. LaFranchi’s pieces.

Esther de Ipolyi

Sugar Land, Texas

Insight into agriculture in the US

The May 30 Monitor Daily story “Adapting for an arid era, Texas farmers scratch crops from dust” is very good. I am in agribusiness and this helps non-ag people understand the agricultural situation and how it is being addressed. Thank you.

Daniel Block

Bainbridge Island, Wash.

Finding the Cartagena reef

Regarding the June 4 Monitor Daily story “The improbable reef of Cartagena”: When I read this story, I was curious to see a nautical chart of exactly where the reef is. It is very interesting that the reef has been hidden for so long.

Grace Lorentzen

Long Beach, Calif.

[Editor’s note: A map showing the location of the reef ran with the story in the June 4 Weekly Print Edition.]

Covering new ground

The June 11 editorial “A new unity in Congress on solutions for climate change?” is a marvelous example of the Monitor’s perspective – not just showing where there’s middle ground, but also new ground.

I try to stay in tune with the issues and technologies of climate change, but I was not aware of the promise that carbon capture holds as one facet of a multimodal response. Thank you so much for this editorial.

David Walton

Littleton, Colo.

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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.”

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