Editorial February 4, 2019 Issue

Good news that’s credible and shareable

Robin Hoagland

While I was chatting recently with a local business owner, she mentioned that she had canceled her cable television subscription. She’s a single mother raising two children, and said that having the news on brought too much negativity into her home. But she admitted that she didn’t really know what was going on anymore.

I knew she was a deeply caring person who loved her family and valued her neighbors. It didn’t seem right that she would just withdraw from the world around her. So I asked her if she knew The Christian Science Monitor. I told her it was solution-oriented journalism, founded “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 353). She liked that idea very much.

Pulling out my phone, I clicked on the website and showed her the digital stories posted that day. A couple of them tackled the tough issues in that news cycle, but with an eye toward paths of progress. Others highlighted what various individuals and groups were doing to overcome entrenched problems from the local to the global level. It was evident that each story strove to lift up the humanity of the people in it.

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Bible Lens—February 4–10, 2019