Last month I spoke at the American Scientific Affiliation's annual meeting, a gathering of scientists who see both faith and science as essential components of understanding our world and each other. This approach echoes the Trust's own aim to inspire and support the value of faith and the validity of science in creating thriving communities, a belief rooted in our founder Jack Murdock's own conviction in the importance of both.
In my talk, I opened with the well-known experiment where people watch a video of two teams passing a basketball and are asked to count the passes made by one team. Partway through, someone in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the shot, thumps their chest, and walks off. About half the people watching never see it, because their attention is focused on counting the basketballs. The experiment reveals the illusion of attention: our confident belief that if something significant happened right in front of us, we would surely notice — but we don’t always.
Alongside that experiment, I kept thinking about an ancient story from 2 Kings in the Hebrew Bible. A man wakes up to find his city surrounded by an enemy army and panics at what he sees. His mentor, Elisha, prays a strange prayer for him, that the man’s eyes would open. When they do, he sees what had been there the whole time: horses and chariots ready to defend the city. He just hadn’t been able to see them. Later in the Christian text, Jesus asks his disciples something similar about their attention: “Do you have eyes but fail to see, ears but fail to hear?”
These stories remind us that what we pay attention to shapes what we're capable of seeing.
That's the same conviction underneath ASA’s work. A scientist who studies one organism for decades, patient enough to keep being surprised by it and keep making discoveries, is practicing something that looks a lot like devotion. A person of faith who keeps returning to the same text and lets it change them is practicing something that looks a lot like rigor. They each take what’s before them seriously enough to really look at it and let the fruits of a long obedience shape their discoveries, rather than settle for a first impression.
What does that mean for our work in the social sector? So much of what this sector trains us to do, for understandable reasons, is fix things: spot a problem, move to a solution, measure the result. That instinct is well-meaning, but it can mean we design solutions for a landscape we never really understood. The harder discipline is to attend first: to watch, to ask questions we don't already know the answer to, and to hold our own assumptions loosely while we let what we learn shape the solutions.
I’ve also been thinking about what our attention produces. When it narrows to protect what we already believe, it produces hiding. We notice what confirms our existing beliefs and screen out what complicates them. In religious contexts, this can produce blindness that leads to real harm, and in scientific contexts, it can lead to incomplete conclusions. In the social sector, when we focus only on the wound or the threat alone, and how we can help it, we can produce harm too. We start treating people as something to fix instead of people from whom we can learn and people who have innate power to shape their own outcomes with support.
What I keep coming back to is this: attention isn't just how we notice the world. It's how we serve it well. The people and communities we work alongside deserve that kind of looking, the patient, unhurried kind that doesn't rush to conclusions or force solutions — the kind of disciplines that both scientists and theologians can teach us. That's the discipline I hope we can practice together.
Romanita Hairston
Chief Executive Officer