attention on Smart Phones

We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...

Tony Reinke does a great job capturing the deep ambivalence many of us feel about our smartphones in this short excerpt: This blasted smartphone! Pesk of productivity. Tenfold plague of beeps and ...

Years ago, my family and I visited Sequoia National Park in California. The highlight of this trip was seeing the Giant Sequoia redwoods, after which the park is named. These trees are awe-inspiring, ...

Sisters and brothers, hear the good news When our faith falls short, God remains faithful When we are distracted, God remains attentive When we judge ourselves and others, God offers mercy and forgive...

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...

In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...

Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But ...

According to a research study funded by Microsoft, between 2000 and 2015 the average attention span decreased from twelve seconds to eight seconds.

Since the rise of capitalism, it has been known that capturing someone’s attention could cause him to part with some money.

Beginning with radio, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content.

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

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...

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrins...

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson describes what has become a reality of modern-day life-scandals happen every day, and no-one...

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

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...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

Teenage prostitutes, during interviews in a San Francisco study, were asked: “Is there anything you needed most and couldn’t get?” Their response, invariably preceded by sadness and tears was unanimou...

Too often we give real estate to things in our lives that either haven’t earned their land or were never meant to occupy important space in the first place.

In the Critically acclaimed 2018 horror film A Quiet Place , Earth faces an alien invasion unlike any other. In the movie, the aliens behave like merciless monsters, using their lightning-fast sp...

We want big directional signs from God. God just wants us to pay attention.

There is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention.

Sustained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, subjects bud and sprout and grow. At every moment, they please by a new consequ...

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

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...