A school mindfulness program in Ohio is shutting down after parents complain:

The Tibetan bell no longer tolls at Warstler Elementary in Plain Township.

The school had adopted a practice called mindfulness, but stopped after some parents and community members raised concerns the technique was linked too closely to Eastern religions like Buddhism.

“There was no malice from anyone in the district to bring something in that was not appropriate,” Superintendent Brent May said in a recent interview. “As we kept digging and researching, we found the roots to it. We have to be careful as a public school that we don’t cross over church and state.”

As one parent complained, “Why are they taking valuable teaching time from my child?”

Leave aside for the moment that Mr. May’s statement actually doesn’t mean anything if you, well, read it; also step over the question of whether Buddhism is a religion or not; what jumps out at me are two things: the claim that mindfulness is foreign; and the idea that it’s unimportant.

First, the idea that mindfulness is “linked too closely to Eastern religions:” have we really all forgotten Thomas Merton so quickly?* Or David Stendahl-Rast? Augustine? The entire monastic tradition (very nicely made relevant to modern times by Christopher Jamison’s Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life)? Or Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (which observed, “How sad that contemporary Christians are so ignorant of the vast sea of literature on Christian meditation by faithful believers throughout the centuries!”). Despite differences in the details of the practice, mindfulness is about as Eastern– and as foreign to Western faiths, or scholarly traditions– as reading.

Second, being able to control your attention, to be aware of where your mind is and what you’re focusing on, and to exercise some control over that process, is “taking valuable teaching time from my child” only if your child is A) a Vulcan, or B) already capable of awesome powers of concentration.

This is why one of the projects I want to take on after the book comes out is a Christian gloss on contemplative computing, explaining how Christian contemplative writing can be used to help deal with digital distraction. Clearly it’s a necessary project.

*Of course, given that ministers worry about the problem of ministering to distracted people, the question is a bit rhetorical.