Theological Journal – January 22, 2020 Attention (1)
Early last year I realized that the issue at the heart of our difficulties in being Christian is attention. Attention to God. I hypothesized that such attention was a matter of intention and repetition. Attention-intention-repetition was the process I began to think on and try to work out the details. And I failed, Through wrong focus and/or inability I came up empty with anything beyond the banal. And then I turned my attention to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age because I believed needed to finish reading it because of its importance. And I was right – just not in the way I expected. Taylor was and is extremely important for me because he helped me recalibrate my focus on the issue of attention I had run into a dead end on. Of course, Taylor’s work is important in a number of other ways too. But it was his contribution to my grasp (or at least a beginning grasp) on the matter of attention that grabbed my interest. Taylor claims that our contemporary “loss” of experience o...