Aernaut Mik: Impressions from the multi-channel installation Speaking in Tongues, which was shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt from November 2013 to January 2014.

From November 2013 to January 2014, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) showcased video artist Aernout Mik’s multi-part video installation “Speaking in Tongues” under the auspices of the Global Prayers Congress. An essential component of Mik’s work involves comparing the prosperity gospel and the practices of religious communities who espouse it with the beliefs and practices of the secular business world, exploring the extent to which the business world relies on religion for establishing its own rites and practices, and vice versa. Mik’s approach combines aesthetic, fictional, and documentary elements, resulting in the creation of an autonomous artistic performance that both brings to life and reflects on the individual phases of the exploratory work.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony’s interview with NDSP fellow Rebekah Richert about her research had a number of fascinating aspects: I blogged for Psychology Today about the one that surprised me most.

People say God knows everything, but adults and children may actually believe something quite different. . .

[Editor’s Note: This essay resides within Anderson Blanton’s “The Materiality of Prayer,” a portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

Global televangelists, with their empires of technologically progressive media, are on the forefront of changes to evangelical prayer techniques and their implementations. People often seek out healing from big names in the international revivalist circuit, healers whom they believe they have witnessed (likely from television) serving as efficacious conduits of the Holy Spirit. Itinerant healer Benedictus Toufik Hinn—known around the globe as Pastor Benny Hinn—is a vanguard figure within these developments.

Hinn’s website serves as a hub of online prayer resources and simultaneously constitutes a new form of social prayer. “Amazing things happen when people come into agreement,” Hinn makes clear on the website. While cultural commentators make much about the fragmenting effects of social technologies on modern persons, Hinn underscores the unifying nature of the medium: “Benny Hinn Ministries is dedicated to praying in unity with people, just like you, who desire to see the Holy Spirit’s miracle-working power unleashed.” Prayer, extrapolating from Hinn’s description, is a coming into agreement with others, a facilitation of unity, and a focusing of concerted mental effort onto some entity, need, problem, or situation in need of address. Internet prayer centers such as Hinn’s supplement existing evangelical prayer rituals by bringing together physically distant, individual penitents. These new techniques do not intend to replace traditional practices—such as index-card sized prayer request forms, turned in physically at church services or revival events—but rather to add to an existing repertoire of methods.

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In their recent essay, “Connective Implications of the Material Holy,” Sarah A. Riccardi and Aaron Sokoll critique Sonja Luehrmann’s prayer portal, “Praying with the Senses,” for being overly invested in the question of efficacy and its relation to practices of Eastern Orthodox prayer:

In her curatorial introduction, Sonja Luehrmann acknowledges the importance of aesthetics and materiality, but she ultimately suggests that the most pressing issues requiring investigation are the efficacy of prayer and, possibly, the spontaneity of petitionary prayer…. Rather than seeing efficacy as a uniting principle among these fine essays, we see the materiality and visuality of prayer as the most vital part of this portal.

I find this critique extremely productive, not because Luehrmann’s portal actually neglects the question of materiality, but because it identifies the current re-conceptualization of the term “ritual efficacy” by scholars in the fields of anthropology and religious studies. Albeit implicitly, Riccardi and Sokoll’s “Material Holy” piece issues a call for scholars of religion to clearly articulate a new definition of “efficacy” in relation to prayer. Indeed, if we begin to conceive of the efficacy of prayer as an organization of sensory potential and attentive structures that is inextricably related to devotional objects, media technologies, built environments, bodily techniques, etc., then the two seemingly different approaches to Eastern Orthodox prayer appear to be more closely related. In this way, it is precisely efficacy that is the uniting principle between the compelling entries in the “Praying with the Senses” portal—that is, if we define the efficacy of prayer as a sensation of communicative presence with the ‘holy’ that is actively organized, inflected, attuned, and extended by the agency of the devotional object itself. Or to put this another way, we could define the efficacy of prayer as a sensation of presence that radiates or resounds at the interface of the pious body and the devotional object (see for instance, “There is No Distance in Prayer”).

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As a professor and journalist my primary academic focus is about researching and reporting on how people interact with God. The direct experience of God has been of endless interest to me my entire life, probably since the moment my caretaker told me about prayer, and how it was possible to speak with God by praying.

It was quite a revelation to be told that God was with me, even inside me, and that He was listening when I prayed, either in Church with others via rituals, or by myself, aloud or silently. The idea of God being present and accessible, essentially in every way, was amazing.

In the last few years I’ve gathered empirical and experiential data in the form of stories and methodologies of Christian prayer, all about people’s direct interactions with God. I’ve tried to connect antiquity with contemporary practices, recorded and output in several media: text, oral histories, ethnographic film, and audio. My findings have been published in several media: a mass-market trade book, Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer, a documentary feature film and national PBS television special under the same title, and a national public radio program, “Rethinking Religion: the Harlem Renaissance.” I also have an academic book in the works on hesychia or silent prayer, coming in early 2014 published by Fortress Academic Press.

Recently, while researching and planning to produce and direct a new PBS network television movie, “Sacred,” a filmed anthology of worldwide rituals (WNET, New York), I had the opportunity to be interviewed by monks at Vatopaidi Monastery on Holy Mount Athos in Greece, which was featured in their new online journal, “Pemptousia.” I discuss my doctoral research on the Jesus Prayer, and how I was inspired to create a feature film and book on the subject.

The monks were also quite interested in an article I had previously written for the Huffington Post Religion section on “Why It’s Cool to Go to Church Again.” The monks asked me to update and revise it for their journal, Pemptousia. This is a mass-market glimpse of what some people say they encounter through Church, and through prayer in a ritualized context.

[Editor’s Note: This essay resides within Anderson Blanton’s “The Materiality of Prayer,” a portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

A woman seriously ill in Norway heard my voice over Radio Luxembourg, the most powerful station in Europe. She couldn’t understand a word of English. Two words stuck in her mind: my name, Oral Roberts. However, she later testified, that there was a power in my voice. Suddenly she sensed I was praying. She felt impelled to rush over to her radio and place her hands upon it. As my voice continued to utter prayer, she felt the surging of God’s power enter her body, and in the flash of a second—she was healed!…I prayed in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This prayer was put on Radio Luxembourg in Europe. A woman in Norway, who couldn’t understand a word I was saying, felt God’s power in my voice and was instantly and completely healed. There is no distance in prayer. God was with me in Tulsa when I prayed, was in Luxembourg in Europe when the program was released, was in Norway with the woman who couldn’t understand English. God is everywhere; therefore, there is no distance in prayer. (America’s Healing Magazine, Jan. 1955, Page 2)

Pentecostals often invoke the saying “there is no distance in prayer” to describe the collapsing of physical distance through the performance of prayer. Oral Roberts popularized this phrase on a mass scale during the 1950’s to explain the way that patients could be cured through his performances of healing prayer despite the fact that his actual physical presence remained unavailable to the dispersed magazine, radio, and television audience. On the one hand, this key descriptive phrase is based on the idea that “God is everywhere; therefore, there is no distance in prayer.” This overt theological claim, however, elides the specific circumstances of technological mediation from which this descriptive phrase emerged.

As described by many practitioners of Pentecostal prayer, this negation of physical space between two distanced religious subjects and the concomitant unleashing of healing power is actuated by faith. During these performances of prayer, it is faith that bridges the distance between both the sacred and the everyday, and the patient and healer. This faith, in turn, requires a physical point of contact to enliven the efficacy of the prayer—what Roberts called “turning your faith loose.” This key component to the technique of healing prayer, however, reinscribes the material supplement in the selfsame moment it claims no distance in prayer. 

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[Editor’s Note: This post is in response to Real Presences: Catholic Prayer as Intersubjectivity, Robert Orsi’s portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

When I was a doctoral student many years ago, Bob Orsi insisted I pay attention to sacred presences in the Pagan rituals I was studying. As a student trained in a field still coming to terms with its theological past, I had not been looking for real presence. Practices and gestures, social relationships and structures: I thought these were the important elements of ritual worthy of my consideration. But Bob has consistently made us aware of what historians of religion and other religious studies scholars have so pointedly ignored. His prayer portal, “Real Presences: Catholic Prayer as Intersubjectivity,” helped me to reconsider the ways in which prayer is transposed from religious traditions like Catholicism into the unexpected places that I study: backyards where Neopagans raised Catholic pray to statues of the Madonna, who is nestled next to images of Pan and Gaia; a protest site sprinkled with holy water by agnostic radical environmentalists; a temple for the dead at the Burning Man festival decorated with prayer flags by recent converts to Buddhism; and a New Age dance church where former Protestant evangelicals “sweat their prayers.”

I am curious about how presence adapts to and changes in unexpected places, the fluidity with which practices like prayer move across religious boundaries and identities and take on new meanings in new contexts. (Of course this happens within older traditions as well, as Bob’s work on religion in the streets and cities has taught us.)

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The January 24, 2013 issue of Nature features “The Ritual Animal,” an article by Dan Jones on the study of ritual that draws on research conducted by New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Jeremy Ginges.

The article focuses on research that Brian McQuinn and Harvey Whithouse conducted while McQuinn was traveling with Libyan rebels in 2011. They focused on understanding how the rebels “used ritual to create solidarity and loyalty amid constant violence,” and how rituals evolved over a period of time marked by intense combat and victory.

Rituals are a human universal—”the glue that holds social groups together,” explains Whitehouse, who leads the team… Rituals can vary enormously, from the recitation of prayers in church, to the sometimes violent and humiliating initiations of US college fraternity pledges, to the bleeding of a young man’s penis with bamboo razors and pig incisors in purity rituals among the Ilahita Arapesh of New Guinea. But beneath that diversity, Whitehouse believes, rituals are always about building community—which arguably makes them central to understanding how civilization itself began.

McQuinn and Whitehouse operate on the theory that rituals are either “doctrinal” or “imaginistic.”  In the first instance, rituals are easily transmitted to both children and strangers, and are suited to large-broad-based communities “that do not depend on face-to-face contact.” By contrast, “imaginistic” rituals are more suited to small, intensely committed groups, and are often more traumatic in nature, allowing for the creation of strong bonds among the participants.

Jones contextualizes McQuinn and Whitehouse’s research within a larger set of studies conducted with other communities around the world. In particular, he draws on research conducted by Ginges and his colleagues in Palestine.

Read the full piece here.