Speaking About God

A Dialogue with Simone Weil

The crisis of religion today stems not simply from the fact that certain tenets of faith have lost their validity for us, or that we no longer believe in God. The crisis of religion has a deeper source: it is rooted in a crisis of attention, a crisis of seeing and hearing. It is not God that is dead, declares Byung-Chul Han, it is the human to whom God revealed himself that is dead.

For many people today, attention has been displaced by perception, and perception, in our age of information overload, has become voracious it has become ‘binge watching’. It is flattened with junk information and communication, with sonic and visual waste. We ‘eat’ but we no longer ‘look’. Our voracious perception has no need of attention; it is controlled by addiction and dopamine and it devours whatever is presented to it. And a soul that only eats without looking loses its contemplative capacity.

Only the soul