Professor, Jamie Kreiner

Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, University of California, Los Angeles

We are not alone in our distraction. Even early Christian

monks — women and men who had given up nearly everything in order to concentrate on God — still found themselves struggling to concentrate. But rather than surrender in desperation, they devoted considerable creative energy to find ways to fight back. This lecture surveys the interlocking strategies that monks developed to deal with distraction, to come to grips with a complex world in which their minds couldn't stop moving.