worldview and perspective on Distraction

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

O God, too often we turn to You when we have no other place to go, but your arms are always open wide. Forgive us for using you as our last resort when you ought to be our first. We confess that you h...

Eternal God, we recognize that Your ways are mysterious. Teach us to be still and to wait for You. We confess our sinfulness, our need for control, and our discomfort with the unknown. Instead of turn...

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount o...

The American philosopher and psychologist William James once defined human attention as a “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opp...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ...

Once, a bird flew into our tiny house and wouldn’t fly out. It took more than an hour for our whole family working together to catch that silly little sparrow. Shooting the bird with a BB gun? Easy. B...

In the first chapter of her book, Get Out of Your Head , author Jennie Allen shares a vulnerable and honest moment from her own life about just how hard it can be to focus in a world of distraction...

Have you ever wondered the impact noise can have on our cognitive ability? Psychologist Arlene Bronzaft was curious to find out. Studying Public School 98 on the northern tip of Manhattan, Bronzaft fo...

I recently watched a children’s movie (Extinct, 2021) with my kids. To be fair, it probably will not receive any Academy consideration, but it was enjoyable. The story revolves around a pair of extrem...

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.

There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other wo...

The desert saints said that the beginning of renouncing a thought is simply noticing it. That is part of what I’m doing in my quarter hours—I am noticing, and naming, and then, for a few minutes, quar...