Over the years, The Christian Science Monitor has been recognized as one of the world’s best newspapers. But reporting the news is only the beginning of the Monitor’s job.
One of the paper’s principal aims is to help readers pray about the news. It does this by uncovering and communicating truth at different levels, from the surface facts—who is doing what, where, and to whom—to the underlying issues, the less visible mental machinations, which must be dealt with if prayer is to be effective.
These hidden mental influences animate some of the most insidious evils of modern human experience. The devious use of social media by terrorist groups to attract followers, the misinformation coming from some governments to try to fool the public into supporting disruptive or criminal actions, ideologies that push adherents to accept mistaken conclusions without deep thought—these and many other elements of what we see in the news today depend on mental deception to do much of their work.
