It’s difficult to maintain attention when surrounded by distractions. Even if we’re just trying to focus on our own thoughts, distracting words have a way of popping into our head uninvited. David Marno has been studying early Christian thinkers, for whom prayer meant paying attention to God, leading them to worry that distracting thoughts were caused by evil demons. But avoiding these demons of distraction wasn’t the goal for everyone: the poet and preacher John Donne believed that true attention could only emerge out of distractedness, and so wrote poetry that moves readers from distraction to spiritual attention.
Tag: religion
A utopia presents an ideal world that has overcome the problems of the present. For the original Utopia, written by Thomas More in the 16th century, one of those problems was the division of land into public and private. His solution was shared ownership of the land. But what sounded good on the page didn’t work so smoothly in practice. German professor Bethany Wiggin shows us how utopian thinking shaped the founding of Philadelphia — and how it clashed with the values of the Lenape people already living there.