To See as Mary Sees: Marian Art and the Crisis of Attention

Is visual art the antidote to our digital-age distractability? To some commentators, we can rebuild our mental focus through slow, concentrated contemplation of a single artwork. But this is not the only way art can address the attention crisis. Art also offers models of attention, the workers and saints and patrons depicted, who exhibit what a healthy or unhealthy human gaze looks like. No exemplar of attention is more important than Mary, whose attention has been explored more often and more deeply than that of any other figure in the history of Western art.

In this talk, we will pay attention to Mary’s attention and see what there is to learn from it. We will find that Marian art reveals that human attention is more than just focus. Mary does more than lovingly regard her son. She is distractable, too, and for good reason. Marian art, then, prompts us to ask if the very thing we see as a great digital-age vice – our constant anxious anticipation of the next phone notification – might actually be essential to Christian spiritual life.

Bio:

Jonathan Malesic is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, America, Commonweal, Notre Dame Magazine, The Guardian, The Hedgehog Review, and elsewhere. His writing has been recognized as notable in The Best American Essays four times and in The Best American Food Writing. His latest book, The End of Burnout (University of California Press), was selected as a best book of 2022 by Amazon and the Next Big Idea Club and has been translated into ten languages. He is now working on a book for students, inviting them to the transformative learning they can experience in college. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia and teaches writing at Southern Methodist University.

Support for this program is generously provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.

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