The Attentive Life

Your attention, please. That's what God wants, Leighton Ford discovered. It's the path to becoming like Christ. Distractions, fear and busyness were keeping Ford from seeing God's work in and around him. He was missing God. So he began a journey of longing and looking for God. And it started with paying attention. In these pages, he invites you to journey with him. Using the rich monastic tradition of praying the hours, Ford will walk with you, helping you pay attention to God's work in you and around you throughout each day and in different seasons of your life. If you're busy, distracted, rushing through each day, you might be feeling disconnected from God, unable to see how he's working. You might be missing him. But the way toward him starts with a pause and a prayer—with intention and attention—and becomes a way of life, awake and alive to the peaceful, powerful presence of God.

“We all know how easy it is to lose concentration and let our attention wander. It happens so easily, and far too frequently, this problem of inattentiveness. This also happens in the spiritual life. God speaks to us but we fail to recognise his voice, our minds are elsewhere, we are not attuned to his whisper. He wants to lead us and guide us, but we miss his gentle promptings. He is present all around us, yet we don’t register his nearness. This robs us of a greater depth in our relationship with him. The purpose of this book is to help you become more consistently aware of God; to train your ear to hear his voice, and your eye to see what he is doing; to grow and improve so you can serve God more effectively.” – Tony Horsfall, in his Introduction

Consciously or unconsciously, humans always pay attention to a wide variety of stimuli. Attention is part of daily life and it is the first step to understanding. The proposed thesis deals with a computational approach to the human attentional mechanism and with its possible applications mainly in the field of computer vision. In a first stage, the text introduces a rarity-based three-level attention model handling monodimensional signals as well as images or video sequences. The concept of attention is defined as the transformation of a huge acquired unstructured data set into a smaller structured one while preserving the information: the attentional mechanism turns rough data into intelligence. Afterwards, several applications are described in the fields of machine vision, signal coding and enhancement, medical imaging, event detection and so on. These applications not only show the applicability of the proposed computational attention method, but they also support the idea that similarly to the fact that attention is the beginning of intelligence in humans, computational attention may be the starting point of artificial intelligence in engineering applications. Several databases containing different kinds of signals were used to test the model and its applications: audio signals of natural complex ambiences and events, real-life video sequences as well as simulated sequences and finally natural scenes, textured or synthetic images. Results are presented in a clear and comprehensive way within each application providing the relevance of the use of the computational attention model. Finally, a large discussion is opened based on the theoretical and practical achievements and future extensions are proposed.

Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award Logos Association Bookstore Award Bookwi.se's Favorite Books of the Year Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year "Be quick to listen, slow to speak." —James 1:19 How would our lives change if we approached every experience with the intention of listening first? In this noisy, distracting world, it is difficult to truly hear. People talk past each other, eager to be heard but somehow deaf to what is being said. Listening is an essential skill for healthy relationships, both with God and with other people. But it is more than that: listening is a way of life. Adam McHugh places listening at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships and our mission in the world. God himself is the God who hears, and we too can learn to hear what God may be saying through creation, through Scripture, through people. By cultivating a posture of listening, we become more attentive and engaged with those around us. Listening shapes us and equips us to be more attuned to people in pain and more able to minister to those in distress. Our lives are qualitatively different—indeed, better—when we become listeners. Heed the call to the listening life, and hear what God is doing in you and the world.

This book is an album of the famous and infamous seen through the attentive eye of the late journalist Helen Dudar—“a writer,” as the editor’s preface remarks, “of wit, grace, rigor, intellect and astonishing range.” In these pages, Paul Cézanne cohabits with John Updike, Sigmund Freud with Shelley Winters, Michael Douglas with Malcolm X; Dylan Thomas and Janice Joplin are discovered sleeping under the same roof, although in different beds and at different times; Woody Allen is encountered as a young comic on the way up, Henry Kissinger as a world leader on the way down, Norman Mailer as an office-seeker on the way nowhere. The threads binding them together in these fifty-two stories are Dudar’s luminous prose, her authoritative voice, and her keen, ironic vision. “She is a writer’s writer, a journalist’s journalist, and a reporter’s reporter,” the filmmaker Nora Ephron says in her introduction. “...Helen Dudar writes frequently about everything and does it better than just about anyone else.” The Editor

Apart from being a scholar and theologian, Rowan Williams has also demonstrated a rare gift for speaking and writing plainly and clearly about essentials of the Christian faith. In the chapters of this book he writes with profound perception about the life of holiness to which we are called. The range of Williams' frame of reference is astonishing – he brings poets and theologians to his aid, he writes about the Rule of St Benedict, the Bible, Icons, contemplation, St Teresa of Avila and even R. D. Laing. He concludes with two chapters on the injunction 'Know Thyself' in a Christian context. Throughout, Williams points out that holiness is a state of being – it is he writes 'completely undemonstrative and lacking any system of expertise. It can never be dissected and analysed.'