The first thing you’ll see on ScreenAttention.com is “Attention to art and faith, beauty and mystery from the back seat of the movie theater.”
Screenattention.com is a space for me, Brian Duignan, to love movies out loud. I hope the movie-love I express here can be refracted by my love for God, as I believe that second love is what makes every other love possible. I myself am a Christian, and that identity is priceless to me.
Why the focus on attention? This has at least something to do with me teasing and poking fun at myself. My brain is often riding the seas of its own ADHD, and so I am constantly fighting to give attention to all the things that are needful, truthful, and beautiful in the everyday. I fight to give attention to art and film. I fight to give attention to my family and to those I love. I fight to give attention to those I should be loving more as I strive to honor Jesus’s command to love my neighbor as myself. I fight to give attention to God.
Yet the focus on attention has a lot to do with love. Movie-lovers will remember the moment when Sister Sarah Joan in Lady Bird gifted these wise words to Christine, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing – love and attention?”
We show our love for art and for film by giving it our deepest attention.
We show our love for people by giving them our deepest attention.
We show our love for God by giving Him our deepest attention.
Those three loves are more intertwined and interrelated than we may have realized.