Interactions with Deity

Attention isn't neutral. It involves selection and deselection. The attention economy is real, and a Christian who doesn't think carefully about attention has already conceded the field. Reorientation requires practices that retrain attention against the grain of the contemporary environment.

ACR leverages biblical imagery and Christian language — imago Dei, 2 Chronicles 7:14, Psalm 33:12, exodus typology — while emptying those references of their theological convictions; Christians can discern this move by asking five questions about whether any given reference orients attention to the Triune God or to the nation.

Attention is the substrate of love and the raw material of formation. In a digital environment engineered to fragment it, the deliberate cultivation of attention — through silence, prayer, slow reading, and embodied presence — becomes one of the central spiritual disciplines of the age.

Individual disciplines form individuals. Communal practices form a body. The distinction isn't one of emphasis but of kind. Worship, confession, the Lord's Supper, and the patient bearing-with of difficult people produce a common life that no amount of private practice can substitute for.

Augustine's ordo amoris is right: we are what we love, and our lives reflect the arrangement of our affections. Reordering our loves rarely feels dramatic. It is a series of small recalibrations produced not by willpower but by sustained exposure to who God is.

American civil religion (ACR) is the public use of religious language, symbols, and ideas—God in inaugural addresses, “in God we trust,” national holidays—to give moral meaning to the American political project without lending credibility to any specific religious tradition; its apparent openness to faith masks a competitive relationship that subtly subordinates religion to the nation.

Spiritual disciplines aren’t achievements or proofs of seriousness. They are practices that, over time, form procedural knowing. Prayer is learned by praying. Scripture reading develops instincts that can’t be acquired any other way. The practices form what no amount of teaching alone can form.