More on: Editorial Statement

The God who risked appearing in the flesh is the same God who leaves it to artists to bear witness.

Our solitude turns out to be crowded. The writer’s tiny hut is filled with ghosts; the painter’s chilly studio is populated by unseen rivals; in the poet’s hard-won hideaway, invisible influences lurk. Others are always already there. So much for the romantic myth.

IN HIS BOOK The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford talks about what he calls “ecologies of attention”—the social infrastructure that shapes and channels the way we attend to the world. In an earlier age, quiet spaces cultivated the sort of attention that freed you up to read War and Peace. In the frantic ecology that…