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The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
Bottom of the pile
22
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
5/100Critics
40/100Scholars
Author:
Jamie Kreiner
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
January 3, 2023
An account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challengeâand how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later.
What The Reviewers Say
The subtitle of The Wandering Mind is 'What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction,' which is a tantalizing, if somewhat misleading, proposition. This is a charming and peculiar book. I can’t blame Kreiner for using the cultural obsession with distractibility to train our focus elsewhere, guiding us from the starting point of our own preoccupations to a greater understanding of how monks lived..
The Wandering Mind is a lucid and vivid examination of how early Christian monks created habits of contemplation.
[Kreiner is] a wry and wonderful writer. In The Wandering Mind, she eschews nostalgia, rendering the past as it really was: riotously strange yet, when it comes to the problem of attention, annoyingly familiar.
Kreiner uses a wide array of primary sources spanning the entirety of medieval Christendom, creating a pleasantly readable result. Good proof that the problem of distraction is nothing new..
