Guest Repost: The Allure of the Screen and the Erosion of the Soul: Smartphones, Fascination, and the Call to Contemplation

The invitation of God can come in many voices. Recently, my son, Elign’s voice had a divine tenor and called me into the Lenten season in a profound way. It started with a school essay he wrote advocating for phone-free schools. Organizing his argument around the educational, psychological, and social impacts of smartphones on teenagers, he methodically assembled research demonstrating their harmful effects. His conclusion was devastating in its clarity: "At some point, we're going to look back and wonder why we allowed smartphones in schools, just like we realized schools shouldn't have smoking sections."

What struck me in a convicting way was his observation that "the presence of the smartphone means your assessment by other people and the demand to perform yourself is just always there, so you're never really alone." This insight from a teenager provoked my own self-examination. He even shared in conversation how he wished Youth Group was phone-free because so many spend half the time looking at their phones and never really get to know each other or get past the surface.

In response, I made a simple Lenten commitment: no social media until everyone in the house is asleep. The results have been transformative. Yet I frequently catch myself reflexively reaching for my phone, revealing how deeply this habit has been wired into my daily rhythms. This experience has led me to consider the profound distinction between contemplation and fascination – between engagement that deepens our humanity and the hypnotic allure of screens that leaves us, as philosopher Immanuel Kant might describe, like birds fluttering against mirrors, mistaking reflections for reality while depleting our capacity for genuine connection.

Like an evolutionary adaptation that's outlived its usefulness, our relationship with smartphones has morphed from tool to tyrant. Watch any airport waiting area, subway car, or family dinner, and you'll witness the same tableau: heads bowed, faces bathed in blue light, thumbs sliding across glass with liturgical regularity. The smartphone has become our constant companion, promising connection, knowledge, and entertainment in a pocket-sized package. What if this digital revolution is exacting a steep price on our inner lives and we haven’t paused to think about or discern the habits forming us?

Two recent conversations with Kevin Hart and Norman Wirzba intersected in my mind as I have been processing my social media fast this Lent. Hart describes how the very devices meant to connect us are fostering a "culture of fascination" while eroding what Wirzba identifies as our capacity for "resonance and attentiveness" – qualities essential to contemplative practice and meaningful connection. What if smartphones, through their seductive and attention-fragmenting design, pose a significant threat to our spiritual life by habituating us to patterns of engagement antithetical to contemplation, necessitating the intentional cultivation of contemplative practices as an evolutionary counter-strategy against digital addiction?

Between Contemplation and Fascination

I’m just two weeks into my social media fast and Kevin Hart's contrast between contemplation and fascination is increasingly compelling and revealing of my unexamined tech habits. For Hart, contemplation and fascination are two ways of attending to the moment that shape not just our spiritual lives but our very experience of being human.

Hart describes contemplation as mental prayer, raising the mind to God. When I first encountered this definition it was in a class on the Christian contemplative tradition with Father Sam in Divinity school. There I discovered it was both ancient and revolutionary. What Hart is talking about isn't just a religious technique but a fundamental quality of attention—one that involves emptying the mind of images and concepts. In the Christian tradition, this emptying creates space for divine presence, but I've found this quality of attention invigorating in other contexts—when reading poetry, walking in nature, or truly listening to another person.

What makes contemplation so powerful is its freedom. When we contemplate, Hart tells us, our gaze moves freely around its object, spiraling inward toward deeper understanding. We can approach from multiple angles, following genuine curiosity rather than compulsion. There's a spaciousness to contemplative attention that feels increasingly rare in our digital age. I think of the hours I've spent with certain sacred texts, or watching the patterns of light change across the lake fishing—time that left me feeling not depleted but refreshed, not emptied but filled.

By contrast, Hart describes fascination as a state where our gaze is trapped and preoccupied with a particular image, unable to disengage itself. The word's Latin roots suggest being under a spell, possibly even a malevolent one. Ancient cultures used objects of fascination to deflect the "evil eye"—a fascinating etymological connection in our era of endlessly fascinating screens.

I am recognizing this trapped quality of attention in my own relationship with technology. The difference between being present to the moment versus getting caught in what can become a thirty-minute scroll through social media feels precisely like the distinction Hart is making. In one state, I remain free; in the other, something about my attention becomes fixed, constrained, spinning in circles that lead nowhere.

Kant captured this quality of fascination beautifully when he compared it to "a bird that flutters against a mirror in which he sees his reflection...and at one moment takes it for a real bird, at another, not." I shared this image in a conversation with Bo on the Theology Nerd Throwdown livestream and the chat blew up with people who resonated with the description. We've all experienced that fluttering—the frustrated engagement with something that promises substance but delivers only surfaces, leaving us in a state that prevents sound judgment or deeper understanding.

What strikes me most about Hart's analysis is how it frames the aftermath of these different modes of attention. After contemplation, we return to ordinary awareness feeling enriched, with new insights and connections. After fascination, we come back feeling oddly depleted and dry—a sensation I've experienced countless times after my attention was hijacked by the infinite scroll. It's as though fascination mimics engagement while actually preventing it, offering stimulation without nourishment.

I brought this up during a recent conversation with a group of clergy and asked how many recognized this distinction in their own experience. Nearly every hand went up. One pastor described her struggle to maintain contemplative practices when her phone was nearby: "Even when it's silent, I find my attention drawn to it, wondering what might be happening." Another spoke of instituting "tech-free Sabbath hours" to reclaim the capacity for deeper attention that spiritual practice requires.

What's at stake here isn't just spiritual well-being but our fundamental relationship to reality. When fascination becomes our dominant mode of engagement—as it increasingly has in our digital ecosystem—we risk losing the capacity for the deeper attention that makes meaning possible. The bird continues to flutter against the mirror, mistaking reflection for substance, exhausting itself without progress.

Hart's distinction reminds us that how we attend shapes who we become. In a world increasingly designed to fascinate, cultivating contemplative attention becomes not just a spiritual practice but an act of resistance—a reclaiming of our capacity to engage with reality in ways that deepen rather than deplete our humanity.

The Digital Trap: How Smartphones Hollow Out Our Humanity

If Hart helped me reflect on how the smartphone has recreated our habits of attention and the way it diminishes our internal life, Norman Wirzba has helped me name its impact on our social life. In a sense, the unexamined adoption of our smartphone companion created a digital trap that is hollowing out our humanity.

Consider the quantity of what Wirzba calls "hollow connections," that are increasingly ubiquitous in our daily life. Smartphones promise unprecedented connectivity, but deliver a peculiar form of isolation. It's as if we've been sold a nutritional supplement that actually depletes essential vitamins. The evolutionary psychologist might note that we've adapted over millennia for face-to-face interaction, with its complex interplay of vocal tones, facial expressions, and pheromonal signals. Digital communication strips away these rich channels, leaving us with a kind of connection that fails to satisfy our deepest social needs. One need only think of our lockdown experience and the move to zoom to capture this hollowing of relationships.

Wirzba emphasizes that our fascination with smartphones is deteriorating our connection with the world and increasing our experience of alienation. He pointed toward the sociologist Hartmut Rosa's concept of the "dissipation of resonance," in which our modern form of life comes to mute more and more of the world around us. What's happening here is fascinating: genuine resonant experiences—those that transform us physiologically, emotionally, and cognitively—are being replaced by simulations that stimulate but don't satisfy. It's like we're constantly snacking on empty digital calories that never provide nourishment.

As Wirzba points out, the acceleration of life exacerbated by the presence of smartphones is particularly insidious. Our digital devices compress the temporal space necessary for contemplation and presence. Every moment becomes vulnerable to colonization by notifications, emails, and updates. This acceleration erodes practices like Sabbath that require precisely what our devices discourage: stillness and presence. The evolutionary irony is that we've created tools that optimize for immediate response, essentially hijacking attention systems that evolved in environments where quick reactions to novel stimuli conveyed survival advantages. Like an evolutionary adaptation that's outlived its usefulness, our relationship with smartphones has morphed from tool to tyrant.

Just think of how smartphones have facilitated a "frictionless world" of curated engagement. We can unfriend, unfollow, and filter out anything that challenges us, creating personalized echo chambers. Through algorithmic surveillance and attention harvesting, this turn toward a frictionless space of fascination is the primary mission of our digital companion. Yet the friction of real relationships—working through misunderstandings, reconciling differences—is precisely what builds the resilience and depth that give life meaning. We're using 21st-century technology to avoid the very developmental challenges that made human societies possible. This isn’t just true at a societal level. As I have already observed this Lent, the quality of conversations with family and friends are significantly deeper when I can’t escape the fiction of life for seamless scrolling.

With just a bit of detox from the screen’s constant fascination, I realized the kind of relational numbness and obliviousness it generates. Our devices induce a kind of perceptual tunnel vision, reducing our awareness of physical surroundings and the humans actually present with us. It's as if we've voluntarily accepted a form of selective sensory deprivation. Smartphones don't merely distract us, but fundamentally reshape our capacity for attention, presence, and connection. The evolutionary mismatch is stark: devices designed to optimize engagement undermine the very forms of engagement that fulfill our deepest human needs. Like the experimenter who can explain precisely how the rat gets trapped, Wirzba helped me see the bars of our digital cage—the first step toward finding a way out. If our device-formed life is depriving us of connection to the people who matter most, alienating us from more and more of our neighbors, and numbing us to the web of relations we live and move in, we need to be intentional and discerning about the consequences.

Cultivating Connection Beyond Fascination

If smartphones and digital media have created a hostile environment for contemplative practice, how might we respond? Just as we'd adapt to any evolutionary challenge, we need strategies for cultivating contemplation in a world designed for fascination.

In my conversation with Hart, he suggested beginning with the practice of Lectio Divina (contemplative reading), which counters our culture's emphasis on linear, suspicious reading (scanning for information or hunting for flaws) with a circular, spiraling mode of understanding. Rather than consuming text as quickly as possible, Lectio Divina invites us to read slowly, repeatedly, allowing the words to resonate beyond their immediate meaning. This practice need not be confined to religious texts – poetry, philosophy, and even carefully chosen fiction can serve as material for contemplative reading. The key is developing a mode of engagement that resists the accelerated, superficial patterns encouraged by digital media.

From Wirzba's perspective, cultivating prayerful being involves intentionally slowing down, making time for presence, and resisting life's technological acceleration. This might involve creating smartphone-free zones or times, engaging in regular practices of attentiveness to ourselves and others, and reclaiming the Sabbath as a time set apart from productivity and connectivity. These practices serve as forms of resistance against the relentless enchantment of technology and pathways to rediscovering deeper meaning and connection.

Both approaches share a recognition that contemplative practice requires intention and structure. Just as our digital habits didn't form by accident but through carefully designed technologies and repeated exposure, so too must our contemplative habits be intentionally cultivated. This isn't about rejecting technology wholesale – an unrealistic proposition in our interconnected world – but about developing a more intentional relationship with our devices that preserves space for deeper engagement.

A Confession

I had no idea talking with Elgin about his paper on phone-free schools would instigate this Lenten exploration. When I scheduled the conversations with Kevin Hart and Norman Wirzba, I did not anticipate the synergy between them or conceptual clarity they helped provide. Even more surprising, is the experience of the social media fast itself. I am more present, less anxious and irritable, and consistently discover all the moments of connection I was missing in the stupor of digital fascination.

The smartphone, with its unprecedented power to connect and inform, represents one of humanity's most remarkable technological achievements. Yet like many evolutionary adaptations, what serves one function may undermine another. Through their facilitation of fascination and the dissipation of resonance, smartphones pose a significant threat to contemplative life by hindering the deep attention and receptivity required for both contemplation and connection.

The solution isn't nostalgic technophobia but the intentional cultivation of contemplative practices as a necessary counterbalance to our digital habituation. By creating structures and habits that preserve space for contemplation, we can resist the totalizing influence of digital fascination and foster a richer spiritual existence. In evolutionary terms, this represents a form of niche construction – actively modifying our environment to better support our flourishing rather than simply submitting to its defaults.

As our collective consciousness becomes increasingly colonized by digital stimulation, reclaiming inner space and time for genuine encounter with ourselves, others, and the divine becomes not merely a spiritual luxury but an essential act of human freedom. The question facing us isn't whether to embrace or reject technology, but how to engage with it in ways that enhance rather than diminish our capacity for the contemplative life that has long been recognized as essential to human flourishing. In the midst of the digital age's relentless enchantment, the simple practices of contemplation and attentive connection may prove to be our most revolutionary tools.

You know what's really striking? My teenager figured this out before I did. Thank God for Elgin.

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About the Author:

Tripp Fuller is an American theologian, currently serving as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Theology & Science at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD in Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. and is host of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast, in which he provides insightful interviews with some of the most influential scholars. His new book is: Divine Self-Investment: An Open and Relational Constructive Christology.