6 hours ago
3
I once heard that a journalist, stunned by the horrors they’d witnessed while on assignment as a foreign correspondent, was almost equally shocked to find themselves seeking solace in the strangest of places: a church. Not to pray; that wasn’t their thing. But to sit and take stock in silence – perhaps the most appropriate response when processing history’s bloody body count.
If we’re news junkies, or just extremely online, we’re a little like that traumatised journalist. A little. More removed from frontline carnage, sure, but subject to a similar onslaught of non-stop bad news: polarisation, the climate crisis, grim domestic violence statistics. The rising cost of living, the rise of the far right, and AI threatening to upend our livelihoods.
What to do with all the angst stirred up by negative headlines? We need a better way to cope than avoiding the news (40% of us around the world are already doing that, according to a 2025 Reuters study) or numbing out to mindless reels.
So, as a new year of news begins, I’m counting on spiritual habits to survive the bad headlines of 2026. Not by looking away – I can’t – but by looking better and deeper, which is why I’m asking for new eyes to see. A fragile hope, perhaps. But I’ve a hunch that that a shift in perspective will prove transformative. After all, as the British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes: “Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there.”
When I’m in a doomscrolling death spiral, I’m not conscious of how that constant stream of negativity constricts my view of what’s possible and primes me to keep noticing all the terrible things. An online diet high in apocalyptic forecasts and conflict has a way of screening out everything else. Especially a cornerstone of religious belief that doubles as basic common sense: I don’t know the full story, so more might be going on than the bad headlines make immediately apparent.
If I forget that, it starts to seem sensible – as opposed to highly anxious and catastrophic – to war-game the worst that can happen. Anxiety is already the background hum of my life; my smartphone threatens to make it a full-blown addiction.
I’m sensing, increasingly, that a human being is (certainly more but no less than) a limited amount of attention, and what we pay attention to forms (or deforms) us. But changing our focus is less a matter of mindset than you might think. Rather than counting on willpower to exit the endless scroll on my phone, I need other habits to muscle their way into my life.
A tiny first step but one that might be a giant leap for 21st century humankind: rather than a glowing screen, I want the first thing I see in the morning to be another human face, the outside world or a book of sacred texts. These are the handholds of the immediate reality requiring my attention. Aside from being life-giving in themselves, they decentre my focus from all that I fear and remind me of all there is to love and give myself to, even amid so much sadness and struggle.
How other people or the natural world might shift our perspective seems self-evident. But devotional material – prayers, reflections or Bible verses – adds something extra to the mix, especially texts written in another era. A prayer written by William Wilberforce, for instance, asks God for “more love, more humility, more faith, more hope, more peace and joy”. We remember him as instrumental in the abolition of slavery but he was also an ordinary person seeking grace upon grace. It’s a welcome reminder that previous generations faced their own seemingly insurmountable struggles and, in Wilberforce’s case at least, placed their hopes in more than human effort to save the day.
In the eyes of the believer, Wilberforce’s story is also a clue that all the havoc that fills our vision might blind us to how God is working for good in hidden ways that might elude human (or headline) notice. That’s why it’s so important to cultivate a fresh way of seeing alongside and through all the crisis that surrounds us. One that isn’t blind to harsh realities but that refuses to be cowed by them.
Some will say this is just whistling in the dark. Some days it does feel like that. But showing up with eyes that scan for the good is what counts. It’s a determined, persistent effort to hone our attention, to lift our gaze above all the bad news we can see, and remember that the headlines, though grim, can’t capture the complexity of the bigger picture.
JRR Tolkien once said that, as a Christian, he was a realist inasmuch as he expected history to be a “long defeat”, though one that contained “some samples or glimpses of final victory”. A perspective that scans for those glimpses: that’s the kind of vision that 2026 calls for.
-
Justine Toh is a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity
