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Sunday, August 10, 2026
Hello folks,
The Lord be with you all!
Thank you for your warm welcome to Fr. Don Bosco this past weekend. He had an enjoyable visit and is now “on the road again” to his next mission! Fr. Maher has safely arrived in Ireland and will be praying for all of us during his brief time away.
I have been thinking about the problem of attention during these days.
“What kind of person am I becoming through the habits of attention I cultivate?” This is a timely question for every Christian in this age when the digital environment increasingly seeks to capture our attention.
Pope Leo warns in his recent encyclical Magnifica humanitas (2026) that digital “content” is increasingly shaping how we see the world, forming our desires and influencing our daily choices (135). “This is ‘not a parallel or purely virtual world,’” he writes, “since what originates online now becomes a part of people’s lives, especially of the youngest.” Matthew Crawford offers a helpful analogy. In The World Beyond Your Head (2016), he compares digital content to “hyperpalatable” foods: just as food engineers have learned to make processed foods difficult to resist, digital platforms increasingly present information in ways that keep us scrolling. “Stimulation begets a need for more stimulation.”
Crawford wrote before the rise of generative AI, yet his observations seem even more relevant today. When the content presented to me online is increasingly tailored to capture and hold my attention, perhaps I should ask, borrowing Pope Leo’s language: Are my desires being directed and my daily choices being influenced by an algorithm? The pope’s concern extends beyond individuals to what he calls “the collective consciousness”—the shared imagination and assumptions of a culture. Will we, as a society, become conditioned by various commercial interests?
This may also help to explain why so much of contemporary public discourse—especially online—seems to be marked by anger. (Father Maher has mentioned this many times.) Digital platforms do not merely compete for our attention; they know (or rather “learn”) what keeps it. Again and again, outrage (especially over politics) has proved one of the most reliable ways to capture and sustain attention. Anger is, for many of us, “hyperpalatable.” (I am no exception.)
Crawford draws out one implication of the pope’s insight. Attention does not merely influence our choices; it helps make us who we are. What we attend to gradually becomes what we love, and what we love shapes who we become. We might ask: if my attention is increasingly engineered, then, to what extent am I being engineered?
Perhaps this provides a motive not merely to practice temperance in our digital lives, but (on the positive side) to spend more time with our Lord in prayer (especially silent, mental prayer). In prayer, the Lord himself forms our desires, cultivating in us a radically different habit of attention. Rather than allowing our desires to be “trained” by algorithms, we gain the freedom to attend to Christ. Like Mary of Bethany, we “[sit] beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak” (Luke 10:39). In those brief moments of sustained attention—even five to ten minutes in an empty church!—our desires are purified, our loves reordered, and we gradually become who God created us to be in Christ, the One who “fully reveals man to himself” (Redemptor hominis 8).
We are still seeking volunteers to help out with our annual Saint J.’s collaborative brunch, which will be held at Saint John the Evangelist Parish Hall (Townsend) on Sunday, September 13, 2026 immediately following the 9am Mass. If you are interested, please fill out the online form! We would be most grateful for your assistance. And my deepest gratitude to the many who have already responded—thank you!—Fr. Kwang
p.s.—The feast of the Assumption is not a holy day of obligation this year, but we may have a “daily Mass” celebration at 9am on Saturday morning, August 15 in Townsend, if (1) there is no funeral and (2) if we are able to find a priest. I will announce this at the daily Mass on Wednesday and also on the website!
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