Includes bibliographical references and index.

A revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge, and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later-- The digital era is beset by distraction: we fantasize about escaping our screen, and recapturing a world with less noise. Kreiner demonstrates that the attempts of monks to contemplate the divine order and its ethical requirements were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. She believes that we can learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at monks' strenuous efforts to concentrate. The result is an account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.