“School children and students who love God should never say: ‘For my part, I like mathematics; ‘I like French’; ‘I like Greek’. They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.”
-Simone Weil
Attention is the faculty of the person that attaches him or her to “the Real” – that never-spent, inexhaustible charge of God’s creative & sustaining action found oozing from everything, from the least of things to the greatest – if only we would have the eyes to see. From the human artifact studied in history or literature, to the abstract relation studied in mathematics, to the specimen studied in natural sciences, to the doctrine studied in theology – attention is cultivated when we take a long, slow, and surprised gaze at a given particular in the world.
Long, slow, surprised – all things that our culture undervalues; or, better, whose inverses we instead value – short, quick, unsurprising.
Long, slow, surprised – all things that our culture undervalues; or, better, whose inverses we instead value – short, quick, unsurprising. Our culture is awash with inattention: 280-character Tweets that “explain” a phenomenon; ever-deepening invasive advertising urging us to flee & flit to the next trend; easy information able to be recalled with a few keystrokes; automation & smart technology growing closer to us, promising convenience, while more times than not becoming just another dinging distraction to sate & slake our restless souls, if only for a brief moment; and a social media-driven world of self-promotion, urging us to continue the scroll or swipe in hopes of obtaining the novel, but finally resulting only in unsurprised boredom and a bloated & unsatisfying self-awareness.

Canongate thus aims to create the kind of person who can resist the ephemeral, restless, & detached consumeristic spirit of our age – a spirit that will leave us ultimately inattentive to the Real & with eyes blinded to the sustaining & salvific work of God in the world. The Canongate culture & implicit curriculum centers around the need to foster attention – to give space for a long, slow, surprised gaze given to a thing in the world.
The Canongate culture & implicit curriculum centers around the need to foster attention – to give space for a long, slow, surprised gaze given to a thing in the world.