The Prayer Blog

October 2, 2015

Studying the practice of prayer worldwide

During “Why Prayer?,” the NDSP capstone conference, grantees Fareen Parvez, Shira Gabriel, and Ebenezer Obadare had a chance to sit down and discuss their research in France, the United States, and Nigeria.

Fareen Parvez, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses her research on Muslim women in France.

Shira Gabriel, Associate Professor of Psychology at State University of New York at Buffalo, talks about her work on prayer and cognition.

Ebenezer Obadare, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, describes what he means by the phrase “charismatic Islam.”

September 4, 2015

Interview III: Jeanie Hoskin

Jeanie is an American housewife. Due to her husband Jeff’s job, they spent a few years in the United Kingdom. Jeff was transferred a few months ago to Mumbai, where he and Jennie have been attending Pastor Shekhar Kallianpur’s church in Juhu.

In this interview, Jeanie shares her churchgoing experiences in the United States, the United Kingdom, and now in Mumbai. She draws comparisons between the fellowship in the United Kingdom and in Mumbai, and describes her experience of living in a city where Christians are a minority.

For more details, a complete transcript can be downloaded here.

September 2, 2015

Interview I: Pastor Shekhar Kallianpur

These are excerpts from an interview with Pastor Shekhar Kallianpur. Pastor Shekhar is affiliated with the New Life Fellowship Association and conducts an English-language church service in Juhu, Mumbai. His church is one of the most affluent—many Bollywood actors, athletes, and business families are associated with it. Pastor Shekhar’s church is also actively involved in many crusades, projects such as Power to Change, and various prayer activities in public spaces.

In the following interview, he talks about what it means to be a believer, praying for the city of Mumbai and its citizens. He also comments on India’s anti-conversion laws and discusses how he thinks the believer church’s efforts towards transformation are being misunderstood.

For more details, a complete transcript can be downloaded here.

August 27, 2015

And All God's People Said...: Languages of Prayer in a Global Mega City

The film And All God’s People Said… is an attempt to explore and understand the world of the Pentecostal church in India’s most culturally and linguistically diverse and cosmopolitan city, Mumbai. A significant dimension of Pentecostal practice revolves around the deliberate cultivation of multilingualism, stemming ultimately from the belief that God empowers true believers with the gift of tongues. The film focuses on speech, drawing implicit connections between prayer (speaking to God, often before a human audience) and evangelical efforts that seek to communicate across divisions of language, culture, and class.

In a land where identities are ideologically constructed in terms of place, Pentecostal practice unsettles received national and subnational nativist understandings. The Christian population in India is approximately 2.3 percent of the total population; Pentecostal Christians (or “believers” as they call themselves) are perhaps only 0.1 percent, but they are the fastest growing segment of Indian Christianity. Indeed, they are the only segment that is winning new converts, both from mainstream Christianity and from Hinduism, in any appreciable numbers.

In India, the Christian minority is attacked by Hindu nationalists who believe that Hinduism, as the majority religion, should also be treated as the national religion. Anti-conversion laws have been passed in several Indian states in an attempt to prevent the spread of Christianity and other “foreign” religions, like Islam. And All God’s People Said… tells the story of some of those who do not think in such terms. The film explores the lives of Gauri, Aruna, Raj and Shankar, four first generation Pentecostal Christians in Mumbai. All four of them are from different religious, cultural and economic backgrounds, and all have chosen to convert to Christianity, to be part of the Pentecostal church. During this film they share their life stories, the reasons behind their choices, and how these decisions have changed their lives. Through their stories we get an insight into the Pentecostal churches in the culturally and religiously diverse city of Mumbai.

While working on this film I gathered a substantial amount of audio-video footage which ultimately was not included in the film. I have therefore converted the audio-visual data into an online interactive archive. This archive has free access for those who are interested in knowing more about the believer community in Mumbai. The digital archive includes maps to give an idea of locations at which the footage was shot. The archive includes notes on the various locations and allows the researcher to view extended footage of interviews, prayer meetings, and various prayer activities.

This film was made possible through the Social Science Research Council’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, with support from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this film are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Social Science Research Council or the John Templeton Foundation.

August 24, 2015

Salafi Muslim Women in France and "Je suis Charlie"

Recently, New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Fareen Parvez wrote for the Council for European Studies’ CritCom on the experience of Salafi Muslim women in France, particularly in the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Lyon, where Parvez did her fieldwork, has been a center for political satire since the early 1800s and the rise of the famous puppet character Guignol. Parvez draws a distinction between Guignol and other satirical works that targeted privileged classes (including Catholics) and more recent satire that has targeted underprivileged minorities, like French Muslims. She offers the example of Salafi Muslim women in Lyon, who are prevented from taking part in public life, due in large part to the discrimination they face since laws banning headscarves and burqas were passed over the last decade. With this historical context in mind, Parvez problematizes the popular expression of solidarity, “Je suis Charlie”:

[T]he implications of the slogan “je suis Charlie” are not as straightforward as they are made to appear. To say “je suis Charlie” is not only to denounce the killings and express one’s sympathy with the victims and their societies. It is not only to show one’s support for protected speech and the use of satire. Rather, it simultaneously has the effect of dismissing and invalidating the persistent reality of aggression, harassment, and political and economic exclusions that have been plaguing French Muslims, especially women among the unemployed working-class. Furthermore, it ignores the history of satire and perverts its logic by prodding and provoking those without social power—those who are excluded from public space and denied various dignities of citizenship.

You can read the full article here.

May 8, 2015

New Directions in Prayer Radio Series

NorrisChumley-Egypt-Pyramids

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim May 7, 2015, as a National Day of Prayer.  I invite the citizens of our Nation to give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I join all people of faith in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection as we seek a more just world.

So ended President Barack Obama’s proclamation on the 64th annual National Day of Prayer. At The Huffington PostNDSP grantee Norris Chumley wrote about “New Directions in Prayer,” a three-part radio series produced by the Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life with support from the NDSP project.

New Directions in Prayer is unique for engaging both practitioners and scholars of religion to create a dialogue necessary for an informed public discussion on the role of prayer in people’s lives. Bringing interviews with scholars, professionals, and clergy members together with archival audio, the series is unique in its diverse approach to understanding what prayer is and the roles it plays.

Read more about the radio series and each episode here.

April 29, 2015

Woman-Led Prayer: A Conversation with Juliane Hammer

The following is an interview conducted by Professor Fareen Parvez and Mariam Awaisi with Juliane Hammer, Associate Professor and Kenan Rifai Scholar of Islamic Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Professor Hammer specializes in the study of American Muslims, contemporary Muslim thought, women and gender in Islam, and Sufism. She reflects here on the topic of woman-led ritual prayers in Islam and the debate surrounding them.

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Fareen Parvez and Mariam Awaisi: In your book, American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer, you discuss the various stakes involved in the debate over woman-led prayers. These include the integrity of the Islamic legal tradition, authority, gender justice, and the politicizing of Islam. This is clearly an important issue. At the same time, it seems to us that we must be careful not to conflate the overall status and well-being of Muslim women across societies with their roles within religious ritual practice. Can you tell us more about the importance of women’s leadership in prayer?

Juliane Hammer: In the book I argue that the debate about woman-led prayer is about more than the question of whether women can, should, or want to lead mixed gender congregations in prayer. In that sense, it is not a matter of conflating issues, but a matter of pointing out that what is at stake in the particular debate about women’s ritual leadership is a larger question about the roles of women in Muslim communities. The answers that constitute the debate come from different actors and represent different perspectives. Thus, for those advocating for women’s prayer leadership, it is a reflection of women’s equality to do so, while opponents point out that women’s rights, safety, integrity, etc. can be achieved without their prayer leadership. It is then a debate about whether leading prayers is representative of women’s status in Muslim communities and societies. In other words, if women are not accepted as prayer leaders, what does that tell us about their status otherwise? Do arguments about why women should not lead prayers, such as their menstrual cycle (women are exempt from prayer during menstruation), the potential temptation that their bodies pose for men praying behind them, concerns about the legal validity of prayers performed behind a woman, etc., tell us something about gender roles and boundaries? Taken to its logical consequence, the debate about woman-led prayer is about what equality might mean and whether different interpretations of that idea (i.e. egalitarianism, different but equal, complementary and equal, and so on), as applied to Muslim communities and societies, are part of God’s intent for humanity. It is, of course, also possible to argue that God did not intend equality for the sexes in the social sphere. It is this distinction between the social and ritual spheres that some argue distinguishes prayers from other aspects of life, while others would say that congregational prayer is simultaneously a ritual and social act. Thus, who can and cannot lead prayers is symbolic of both spheres.

FP and MA: Aside from the issue of leading the ritual prayer, there is also the question of khutbas (“sermons”), typically delivered at jum’ah (“Friday prayers”). Although women may not deliver Friday khutbas in front of a congregation, they may write them and thereby communicate and lead via written format rather than oral. Is this actually practiced in the U.S.? Are these types of avenues embraced by Islamic feminists and activists, or are they viewed as limited in potential?

JH: In the debates outlined above, the two acts are often conflated but they are indeed two different religious acts. There is some legal debate, and thus room, for women to lead at least other women in congregational prayer (not Friday prayer), but traditional legal opinions do not under any circumstances allow women to offer the Friday sermon. The two functions, to lead Friday prayer and to offer the khutba, are not always carried out by the same person either.

While the practice of having women write a khutba and then having a male member of the community read it to the congregation was not part of my research, I have of course come across examples a few times, both in North America and in Germany. Some of the women who do this argue that it is an approach that allows them to stay within their communities and affect gradual change. I would estimate, though, that communities that accept this practice are in the minority; women and men who push for more radical change are often faced with the necessity of leaving their communities and building new ones that reflect agreement on these foundational questions.

As I pointed out above, it is worth asking why a woman’s ideas are acceptable in khutba form. In this case, the problem is not her intellectual ability or religious qualifications, but her physical and aural presence in front of the congregation. More broadly, this is a question of the role of change in religious traditions. Are religious communities and their practices and interpretations constantly changing, as Talal Asad argued when he defined the idea of “discursive tradition”? If that is the case, how do communities determine how much change and in which direction? When do religious communities change so much that they disintegrate? And how much uniformity can one expect from a religious community of over a billion followers?

FP and MA: In many communities, women themselves will say that they desire women-only spaces, that such separation suits their norms and makes them more comfortable. What is the relationship between this, on one hand, and the activism in support of mixed congregations and worship, on the other hand?

JH: You are right—many communities, particularly in North America, have engaged in discussions of women’s spaces. In fact, the initial prompt for Asra Nomani, the lead organizer of the 2005 woman-led Friday prayer in New York, was a change in the construction of the mosque she attended in Morgantown, West Virginia. Thus, for the organizers and participants of the prayer event, the two issues are clearly connected.

At the same time, a good bit of the debate revolved around the distinction between women’s prayer leadership and women’s status, roles, and spaces in mosques. There was much broader consensus on the need for women’s participation in leadership and better prayer facilities as well. Prominent supporters of this type of change included Zaid Shakir, an important American Muslim leader and scholar and Ingrid Mattson,then-president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which has led more than one initiative about women’s spaces and status in mosques since 2005.

It strikes me that the arguments about women-only spaces are not new. If one traces the study of Muslim women from the early twentieth century to the present, there was a period in the 1980s in which the earlier condemnation of gender segregation made way for very interesting discussions of women-only spaces and single sex dynamics. This exploration had a lot to do with questions of women’s agency and led to some celebration of segregated spaces. At the same time, this is also a younger version of feminist debates and critiques of the distinction between the public and the private spheres, and the ways in which exclusion from the former creates a power differential that is a product of patriarchy. This, then, brings us full circle in our discussions of gender equality.

There is, of course, also a complex nature/nurture debate at play here: do Muslim women who feel more comfortable in segregated spaces feel that way because they have been socialized to? What should communities do with those women who do not feel that way? Can they be accommodated as well? I am reminded of an episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie, a Canadian sitcom written by Zarqa Nawaz that aired on Canadian public TV from 2007 to 2012. In the episode, the small community at the center of the show debates a physical barrier between men and women in the prayer room. After much discussion the imam arrives at a Solomonic solution: a partial barrier. Those women who want to pray behind it can, and those who don’t can pray behind the men.

Perhaps it helps to think of this as a spectrum and to think of different communal practices, and changes to such practices, as situated on this spectrum. There are communities with a long history of shared prayer spaces and others that have long had separate spaces. It is also the case that Muslim women and men attend prayers and other events at mosques that have spatial arrangements they like, and they might stop going to a mosque whose gender management they do not agree with.

FP and MA: It seems that there’s a tension between the need to sustain a social movement around these issues and the consequences that organized movements can entail, such as sensationalized and inaccurate media reporting. This is especially fraught when it comes to Islam. To what extent do you think that greater social change around Muslim women’s mosque participation can occur in this particular global political and media environment? What have you seen to be the main barriers to sustaining a social movement?

JH: I would not want to think of the visibility of Muslim communities as a barrier to sustaining a movement. This is a version of the argument for not airing dirty laundry in public that has been used to slow or stop all kinds of social change. In fact, as I argue in my book, the organizers of the prayer event intentionally utilized media interest to generate intra-Muslim conversation. And that conversation or debate has certainly taken place under the gaze of non-Muslims in the form of various media. I do not think that media attention, or less positively, media bias, has prevented woman-led prayer from becoming a social movement. I am not even sure that was the intent of the organizers. Rather, the prayer event reflected a certain momentum in terms of gender debate and provided that debate with some energy. There are groups and communities in which women and men take turns leading prayers and offering khutbas, and there are communities where that took place before 2005. There are projects, initiatives, and networks of Muslims who work for changes to existing gender practices, including, but also beyond, prayer leadership. And I find it very important to point out that change is directional. It is dangerous to present changes in gender practices as a trajectory towards progress in which Muslims both perpetually play catch up with non-Muslims and in which religion itself easily becomes disposable as part of what holds women back. American Muslim communities produce discourses and practice their religion in a multitude of ways, while often claiming that their discourses and practices are universal and that there is a larger community of Muslims who need to all agree. The reality is much more complex and in my view provides room for debate and for a diversity of practices and interpretations.

FP and MA: Can we say that the struggle for woman-led prayers is a global phenomenon? If so, in what ways do these struggles and successes abroad differ from what we’ve seen in the American context?

JH: I would say no, it is not a global phenomenon by any means. There have been woman-led prayers elsewhere in the world, again, both before and after March 2005. There are global echoes of the debate that took place in 2005, but the event itself is framed more by the American religious landscape and developments in American society than by shared and global Muslim debates about women’s prayer leadership. That is not to say that it is not also part of global discussions among Muslims about gender roles and women’s status in society. It feeds and is fed by such global conversations. But it is precisely in this global framing that other concerns about Muslim women’s safety, welfare, legal equality as well as issues of poverty, racism, war and occupation take precedent over the specific concern with women’s ritual leadership.

In an interesting way, the international responses to the event in 2005 also help us understand the complex relationship between American Muslims as American and as transnational and the ways in which discursive developments among American Muslims are perceived among other Muslims. The organizers of the event were celebrated, but were also branded as agents of American imperialism, bent on undermining Islam and Muslim societies. It is here that the significance and strategic location of American Muslims becomes most evident. The debate thus allowed for important reflections on the role of American Muslims in global Muslim landscapes.

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Professor Hammer is the author of Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (2005) and American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (2012) and the co-editor of  A Jihad for Justice: Honoring the Work and Life of Amina Wadud (with Kecia Ali and Laury Silvers, 2012) and The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (with Omid Safi, 2013). She is currently working on a book project focusing on American Muslim efforts against domestic violence, and on a larger project exploring American Muslim discourses on marriage, family, and sexuality.

January 28, 2015

Nigerian Muslims' and Christians' Prayer Practices Come Together

2014 Eid ul-Fitr Praying - Imam Ali Shrine - Najaf | Image via Flickr user Sonia SevillaThe news from Nigeria that makes world headlines is most often about violence being done in the name of Islam, but Ebenezer Obadare’s research brings to light a more positive development in the Muslim/Christian relationship. He calls it competitive amity.

“In Nigeria, the fight for converts is fierce and constant with each side promising earthly purpose and eternal salvation. The Muslims have, of course, noticed that the Pentecostals are having great success in winning souls. And so, they are taking lessons and adapting accordingly,” Ebenezer Obadare says.

See the full posting at Psychology Today.

December 17, 2014

Allah Guides to His Light Whomever He Wishes

In Guernica’s special issue on religion in America, NDSP grantee Peter Manseau examines “the evolving place of Islam in America” through the story of Kenny Irwin, Jr. and his annual “Robolights” display.

As one might expect from a man who owns more than 8 million plastic bulbs attached to miles of rubber cording, Kenny has a lot to say about light. He can speak with authority about the amps involved in putting on his display, and he knows that since he switched from incandescents to LEDs a few years ago, he can safely run forty strings of lights together from a single source, instead of only four or five. Yet one word he often uses to discuss light will not be found in any electrician’s handbook: nur.

“I call it a celebration of nur,” he says of Robolights. “A celebration of the fact that God not only created the universe, he shone light into it.”

Read the full story here.

December 10, 2014

Reciting the Quran in the Urban Periphery

One of the practices I’ve regularly participated in during my ethnography of French, working-class, Salafist women is Quranic memorization and recitation. Quranic reading circles are common among women of many mosque communities. Recitation is linked to prayer because reciting chapters and verses from the Quran is part of the required daily prayers (salat) as well as to invocations, such as prayers for protection or healing. For women, reading and memorizing chapters of the Quran, as opposed to salat, is unrestricted: they may do it with or without the hijab, and they may do so regardless of menstruation. To some extent, these factors made our sessions more relaxed and intimate, despite the immense effort and work that reading and memorization demanded.

Beginning courses and study circles in my field site at the urban periphery of Lyon tend to focus on basic literacy. More advanced projects focus on the art of tajwīd, or recitatio­n that follows specific forms of articulation, pauses, and comportment, and is thought to emulate the Prophet’s own practices. Our mosque teacher had said that tajwīd is not obligatory, but it is obligatory to read the Quran correctly (i.e. with no mistakes in pronouncing the Arabic letters). Incorrect reading and recitation could significantly alter the meaning of the verses and in turn, the content of one’s prayers.

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December 9, 2014

Announcing Why Prayer? A Conference on New Directions in the Study of Prayer

The Social Science Research Council’s program on Religion and the Public Sphere announces Why Prayer? A Conference on New Directions in the Study of Prayer (February 6-7, 2015). This two-day gathering will showcase the work of over 30 scholars and journalists exploring what the study of prayer can tell us about a range of topics.

Please join us February 6-7, 2015, for panels and presentations on topics including religious technologies, embodiment, material culture, language, politics, and the mind. Beginning Friday afternoon, the conference will also feature the Prayer Expo—a pop-up installation of multi-media presentations and material objects that call attention to the myriad representations of prayer shaping discourse and practice. On Saturday, two plenary events will highlight the multiple registers of engagement occasioned by new, transdisciplinary research on the practice of prayer.

For more information on the conference and how to register, please click here. Registration is free, but space is limited.

December 3, 2014

The Piety of Celebrating the Prophet

Festival in India | photo by Fareen ParvezIn India, Milad-un-Nabi refers to the celebration of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. The word milad is the Urdu variation of the Arabic word, mawlid, meaning birth. The Prophet’s birth took place on the twelfth day of the Islamic month of Rab ̄ı’al-Awwal  in the Sunni tradition, or the seventeenth day in the Sh ̄ı’ite tradition. Muslims all over the world honor the date, but differently, according to local custom (and, I argue, local politics).

While I was conducting fieldwork among religious women in a poor, largely Muslim, enclave in Hyderabad, I observed the city’s large-scale public festivals and the women’s thoughts about these celebrations. That year, 2010, marked the height of public revelry celebrating Milad-un-Nabi. This was no coincidence, as the festivals (and the riots that ensued) occurred just after the passage of a controversial reservations bill that would allot 4% of government jobs and university seats to Muslims. Milad-un-Nabi thus became a public site for marking and demonstrating local political power, especially in the presence of opposition to policies like the reservations bill.

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November 25, 2014

Theoretical Trajectories: Emotion, Agency, and Power

In many disciplines, early literature often dismissed women’s prayer rituals as superstitions and magic. In recent years much of what has been studied on the subject of contemporary prayer centers on health and psychology, examining questions such as the impact of prayer on women’s emotional well-being, rehabilitation, coping capabilities, and medical conditions such as cancer. Prayer, in these fields, is often understood expansively, as a form of social interaction and sometimes-reciprocal communication that may provide solace and support, and can alter the body and mind. But it is, less expansively, women who have been the primary portals for understanding the emotional effects of prayer. The dominant focus on women, prayer and emotional health may reflect the popular associations between women and emotions, or the need for emotional management and support.

Sociological literature has largely taken up the question of why women are more religious than men. Explanations have ranged from social structures such as the family, gender socialization, and women’s risk-aversion, to even physiological differences. But sociologists of religion have also questioned assumptions and prior conclusions about gendered differences. Some research shows that women’s greater prayer and religiosity is not, in fact, universal, but varies across religious traditions and in accordance with different definitions of religiosity.

Moving away from the perfunctory questioning of women’s connections (both real and perceived) to faith and prayer, scholars began to focus on the details of prayer practices and rituals and what they might tell us about agency or subjectivity. One common theme has been the so-called paradox of women’s complicity with, and resistance to, oppressive gender norms. Why, this literature asks, are women so often attached to beliefs that appear antithetical to their own freedom? The concepts at stake here have mostly to do with women’s agency and the extent to which they do or do not exercise agency in prayer rituals. Scholars describe, for example, Jewish women who wear prayer shawls (traditionally worn only by men) and how, in doing so, they simultaneously challenge and reproduce gender roles. To note a different example that has attracted much attention, consider the controversial case of Muslim women leading Friday prayers at their mosques and how they seek to overcome gendered barriers and norms.

In critiquing dominant tropes of agency and resistance, or shifting the terms of the debate about women and religious practice, some scholars explore the creativity and specific forms of interiority that can develop through women’s experiences of private prayer or the pedagogy and performance of prayer/worship in shaping different forms of embodiment. Others point out how, through its collective nature or specific content, prayer can provide space for women’s leadership and for forging communal bonds. In some traditions, women often exercise agency despite gendered barriers, taking on leadership roles in their segregated spaces, as well as in esoteric religious practices, such as those aimed at healing others or removing afflictions from evil. Further, in many traditions, women’s unique participation in prayer rituals does not necessarily reflect a gender hierarchy, but rather plays an equally important role in the religious community.

The task in the continuing study of gender and prayer is to observe and analyze the relevance of gender and power, but also to heed the critical insights that many feminist theorists have made, especially with regard to making problematic generalizations. As Chandra Mohanty wrote in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” we exercise cultural-imperial power when we construct universal images like “the veiled woman” or “the obedient wife,” or when we fail to see that “woman” is not a stable category of analysis. But by examining specific cases of prayer practices, we can better explore in what contexts, under what conditions, and according to whom, gender acquires meaning.

November 19, 2014

Gender Matters

Light and prayer | Image via flickr user jaci XIIIGender plays a role, whether implicitly or explicitly, in many of the facets of prayer we discuss—whether it is prayer as a form of healing, warfare, politics, social solidarity, or a mechanistic bodily practice. Deities, spirits, objects, and religious narratives often have different relationships to women than to men across religious traditions. Some degree of gender segregation or gendered division of labor exists in many collective prayer practices, either with clear theological basis or in development with various structural contexts. Thus, we find phenomena like U.S. women praying more frequently than their male counterparts, according to survey research; the denigration of healing prayers and practitioners, throughout the world, that are most closely associated with women; women struggling to change the structural formats of collective prayer; and numerous states targeting women’s religious practices. We find prayer forms that reinforce hegemonic feminine and masculine norms; alternatively, we may also find prayer forms that redefine gender and aim to support feminist projects. Most recently, we witness growing conversations about prayer and marginalized communities, including those who fall outside of the male-female binary that constructs much of our world. (more…)

September 24, 2014

National Prayer Days: More Frequent, Less Passionate

I became interested in national prayer days after seeing that President Lincoln had called for national fasting, humiliation, and prayer at the beginning of the Civil War. I wanted to see if other presidents had issued such strongly religious calls and when they stopped doing so. After looking at every presidential prayer proclamation, from Washington to Obama, I wrote a 2,400-word piece. When I wasn’t able to find an outlet for such a long piece, I divided the material and published in The Dallas Morning News and on the website Patheos. Here’s an excerpt from The Dallas Morning News:

American presidents are proclaiming more national prayer days than ever before — three for 9/11 alone (Sept. 5-7 this year) — but as the number of prayer days has increased, the fervor of presidential prayer proclamations has cooled considerably. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” has morphed into something closer to presidential renditions of kumbaya.

From Patheos:

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 call for a Day of National Humiliation, Prayer, and Fasting speaks to a worldview that has almost utterly vanished, a way of thinking that now exists only on the far outer fringes of public discourse. Lincoln demanded a brand of repentance so intense and humble that it went by the name of humiliation. He didn’t use the word figuratively. In his 1864 Thanksgiving proclamation, he advised Americans to “get down in the dust.”

September 16, 2014

Buddhadharma Magazine Asks, "Why Do Buddhists Pray?"

The cover story of Buddhadharma’s Fall 2014 issue asks, “Why Do Buddhists Pray?” In an excerpt from Buddhadharma online, 3 Buddhist teachers explore the place of prayer in Buddhist practice:

Who are we praying to? What are we asking for? Three Buddhist teachers explore what prayer means in a nontheistic tradition and the best way to approach it in your practice.

Read more.

July 30, 2014

Prayer as a Portable Power Source

Unknown Ottonian, Regensburg, about 1030 - 1040 from the J. Paul Getty Museum

According to Christian belief, Pentecost is a remembrance of the disciples of Jesus being comforted after his death by a visitation from the Holy Ghost. Professor Birgit Meyer captured my imagination when she characterized the infilling of the Holy Ghost that occurred at that time as “a portable power source.” That set me to thinking about the spread of glossolalia and the various explanations for the practice. The blog I wrote for Psychology Today, which includes a story by Ebenezer Obadare and a theory by Tanya Luhrmann, begins this way:

Not too long ago, many people were predicting the demise of Christianity. Their predictions may have been borne out in Western countries, where church attendance appears to be dropping. But the worldwide picture is completely different where such talk has been utterly silenced by an explosion of belief in African and Asian countries.

Many of these new converts have come to faith through a particular kind of prayer that’s not much accepted in the West. Known as glossolalia, also called speaking in tongues, this prayer practice is often called the baptism or infilling of the Holy Spirit.

June 25, 2014

Praying Against Others

Cristiano Ronaldo se lamenta | image via flickr user Jan SOLOElizabeth McAlister has written an op-ed piece for the LA Times on imprecatory prayer and claiming credit for negative events.

McAlister discusses imprecatory prayer and what she calls “aggressive prayer” in the Haitian communities she studies, in relation to the World Cup, President Barack Obama, and other small scale incidents such as sickness, layoffs, or theft.

Negative prayer is actually quite common. And praying for harm to befall another — called “imprecatory prayer” — is by no means the exclusive domain of tribal religions in the developing world. Some American evangelicals also have participated in high-profile prayer campaigns aimed at bringing adversity to others.

You can read the full piece here.  

May 8, 2014

Court Rules in Favor of Public Prayer in Town of Greece v Galloway

Taconic-prayingsymbol300x357.jpg (JPEG Image, 300 × 357 pixelIn November, Winifred Fallers Sullivan contributed an essay on a case that was being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, The Town of Greece v. Galloway. At town meetings held in Greece, NY, an opening prayer was—and continues to be—common practice. While town officials claim that members of any faith would be welcome to give these opening prayers, the overwhelming majority of these prayers have been led by Christians, and many have drawn on explicitly sectarian references. Two town residents, one atheist and one Jewish, sued on the basis that the prayers “ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.”

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court handed down their ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway, splitting 5-4 in favor of the town continuing to open its board meetings with prayer. It is interesting to note that the five justices in the majority decision are Catholic, while three of the four in the minority are Jewish. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority; Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the dissent. 

The New York Times provides an overview of the case and the majority and dissenting opinions, and writers at both Slate and The Economist have responded to the ruling.

May 1, 2014

Taking It to the Streets

Ter-Tech's BMW 3 Series Drift Car at PBIR During Sunset | via flickr user Kim Seng

Ever since NDSP fellow Ebenezer Obadare wrote his delightful piece about Africans praying in their cars, I’ve wanted to reference it in a blog about “auto prayers.” When I started writing that post at “Pray for Me,” my Psychology Today blog, I realized that the practice is one I’ve heard a lot about in the United States too.

People often talk and write about praying in their houses or in the house of God, or at hospital beds or over meals. But one of the places people pray the most and talk about the least is in the car. In fact, lots of miracles center on cars.

Read the full post, “Taking It To The Streets.”

March 24, 2014

French Business Bans Prayer Rooms in Bid to Uphold Secularism

French businessman Jean-Luc Petithuguenin employs more than 4000 staff, comprising 52 different nationalities, in his recycling business located in Seine-Saint Denis, the immigrant and Muslim heart of Paris.

The politically active CEO of Paprec, which counts 50 factories across France, has come up with a novel way of responding to rising political and religious extremism in France: a charter of secularism (laïcité) in his workplace. The charter, which was signed unanimously by staff and management, says it is the “duty of the employee to remain neutral when it comes to religion.” “Secularism at the company guarantees employees a common and shared reference, favoring cohesion of the company, respect for diversity and collective harmony…the wearing of all signs or clothing by which staff ostensibly manifest religious affiliation is not authorized,” the charter says.

In practice, that means banning visible signs of religious belief—such as the Muslim headscarf, known as the hijab—as well as prayer rooms.

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March 21, 2014

NDSP Grantees in Readers Digest

In the April Issue of Readers Digest, an essay on “How and Why We Pray” quotes two NDSP grantees, Elizabeth Drescher and Tanya Luhrmann. The article, which takes a closer look at prayer practices in various communities around the United States, examines the ways in which prayer practices have evolved more recently. 

Prayer is ubiquitous in America because it’s so flexible and customizable. Says religion scholar Elizabeth Drescher, a faculty member at Santa Clara University in California, “Among the traditional religious practices, prayer allows the most individual autonomy and authority. That’s especially resonant in our culture, which values personal choice”…”Recently, we’ve been seeing a shift toward more informal but also more imaginative prayer,” says Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Indeed, if they were alive today, pontiffs of the past would no doubt have been confused and amused by one of the first official actions of Pope Francis.

The author, Lise Funderberg, references the ways that media influence has changed prayer—from a congregation in San Francisco writing prayers in chalk on the sidewalk, to Pope Francis’ first tweets, days after ascending to the papacy, to what is perhaps most ubiquitous nowadays, people using Facebook to ask for prayers and to pray together. 

Read the full piece here

March 19, 2014

A year of Reverberations

Reverberations LogoReverberations is one year old!

Just over a year ago, the Social Science Research Council’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere launched Reverberations— a place where participants in the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer (NDSP) project could communicate and share their research and reflections on the practice of prayer, both with each other and with a wider public. Over the past year, the scholars and journalists taking part in the program, as well as an ever-increasing roster of other contributors, have begun to make good on the original promise of Reverberations as a hub for different kinds of thought on the practice of prayer and its many incarnations and implications. Some of our earliest posts asked what it means to study prayer as a practice and raised questions about prayer in public spaces, and the potential tension between secular state and believing citizen. More recent entries have explored the darker side of prayer; the place of prayer and piety in the life of Christian Dalits; and the intersection of prayer, praise, prophecy, and the political sphere in today’s Pentecostalism. And as Reverberations continues to grow into its second year, there is much to look forward to. In the coming days, Sarah Pike, whose reply to Bob Orsi’s portal shed light on “Prayer and Presence in Unexpected Places,” will examine the prayer practices of those who “sweat their prayers” through ecstatic dance. Over the course of the next few months, NDSP grantees and advisory council members will share insights from their ongoing projects in the form of documentary film work on Pentecostal practice in Mumbai; personal reflections on the place of prayer in the lives of those who self-identify as secular; resources for thinking about interfaith prayer spaces, and more. And Steven Barrie-Anthony’s “Prayer in Wider Perspective,” our ongoing interview series in which grantees discuss their NDSP work and related projects, will continue with conversations with Bob Orsi and Mark Aveyard.

Thank you to all who have written for us in the past year, and to all who have read—we look forward to another great year!

February 20, 2014

Praying vs. Playing the Slots

Gambling | Image via flickr user Sean MacEntee

Associate professor of psychology at Indiana University and NDSP member Kevin Ladd is renowned for his thinking and research on prayer. In the Psychology Today blog “Pray for Me,” he gives serious consideration to a comparison that unbelievers delight in making:

To some observers prayer looks a lot like playing the slots.

With a slot machine you put something in (money) and what you’re hoping for (money) may or may not come out after you pull the lever (or push the electronic button on contemporary machines; the lever was too much strain for people’s elbows). 

Similarities abound but so do differences…

 

 

February 3, 2014

One Man's Struggle to Preserve Haitian Vodou

 

New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Elizabeth McAlister talks to Public Radio International about Haitian Vodou and one man’s struggle to protect it from the spread of Evangelicalism.

The old joke goes that Haiti is 70 percent Catholic, 30 percent Protestant and 100 percent Vodou.

For Josué, this is no joking matter. Last year, he took a government job as head of Haiti’s National Ethnology Office. He’s on a mission to get Haitians to realize that they need to embrace their vodou heritage — whether they agree or not.

Listen to the story here.

January 29, 2014

Prayers of a Phonographic Doll

[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.]

Dolls and phonographs share an intimacy with prayer. One of the first commercially available cylinders from the Edison phonograph company, for example, was a component in the “Edison Talking Doll” (1888). Hidden within the sawdust-filled  recesses of this “Dollphone,” one of the interchangeable cylinders played upon the automatic phonograph was the ubiquitous bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” While Edison was busy manufacturing toy prayers, Emil Berliner, the pioneer of the flat “Gramophone” disc, was inscribing the first copies of “The Lord’s Prayer” in an old German doll factory (1889). Since the early days of phonography, praying dolls have been produced on a mass scale as a playful means to imprint pious attitudes upon the developing child.

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January 27, 2014

Three Theories For Why "Nones" Pray

The latest addition to Pray for Me, our Psychology Today blog on prayer, references New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Elizabeth Drescher’s research on why people who claim no religious affiliation pray. From her research, Drescher gives us the nones’ reason for continuing to pray; I also give three guesses for why prayer might persist even when religious beliefs fall away.

The “nones” are multiplying faster than any other religious group.

Nones, which is what scholars are calling people who claim no religion, make up 20 percent of the population, and their numbers are rising faster than any other religious category. One third of Americans under 30 fall into that group.

That’s a lot of folks.

Click here to read the full post, “Nones at Prayer.”

January 24, 2014

National Spiritualism—Annie Besant in India

[Editor’s Note: Part of an occasional series about yoga and its origins.]

In 1909, noted Theosophist (and alleged pedophile) Charles Webster Leadbeater discovered the teenager Krishnamurti on the banks of the Adyar River in a wealthy Madras suburb. Convinced that here was the future “world teacher”—a vehicle for the messiah, in Theosophist lore—Leadbeater’s colleague Annie Besant became Krishnamurti’s guardian. Theosophy is a form of esoteric thought that seeks to understand human-divine connections through a mystical synthesis between ideas of Eastern and Western spiritualism. Besant became head of the Theosophical Society in Madras, British India and created the Order of the Star of the East (1911-1927) to prepare the world for Krishnamurti’s future teachings. During the same period, she co-founded the Indian Home Rule League (1916-1920), which advocated for Indian self-rule and status as a British Dominion. Part of her platform included national education programs to uncover a notion of pre-modern Indian, Hindu civilization beloved of the Theosophists, and to prepare Indian peoples for some form of self-government within what was then an informal British Commonwealth arrangement.

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January 16, 2014

Is Yoga Not Even a Hundred Years Old: Part II

[Editor’s Note: Part of an occasional series about yoga and its origins.]

Yoga garnered a significant amount of journalistic attention in 2013, but often not for spiritual reasons. A recent study has revealed that 15 million Americans now practice Yoga (mostly college educated women) and that almost half of them earn at least $75,000 annually. If you are looking to make money off of spirituality, Yoga perhaps now offers the best chance. Last year $27 billion dollars were spent in the U.S. alone on Yoga products. Yoga has truly become America’s next great prosperity gospel.

But let’s put to one side the lively debate in the Yoga community over whether the art form has been compromised by its new wealthy enthusiasts. The far more interesting question concerns how Yoga evolved from an ancient Indian spiritual discipline into a modern American exercise trend.

A number of scholars have embraced the task of explaining the reception of Yoga in “the West.” One of their aims is to challenge the idea that a “more authentic” form of Yoga has ever really been practiced in either Europe or the United States. They instead argue that Yoga was fundamentally transformed in India via the colonial encounter and thus remains caught up in European encroachments.

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December 18, 2013

Prayers to Santa

[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.]

 

Playful phenomena often reveal hidden or unacknowledged elements in the practice of prayer. Postcard images of praying children were widely circulated throughout the early twentieth century, and these representations of childhood piety helped to solidify particular understandings of prayer within the popular imaginary. These illustrations, moreover, provide a colorful testament to the “apparatus of belief,” or the ways in which the performative and experiential dimensions of prayer are inextricably related to physical objects that open communicative relays between the everyday and the sacred.

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November 12, 2013

Prayer Card

[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.]

One of the most important biblical references in the history of charismatic faith healing, the story of the woman with an “issue of blood” (Mark 5: 25-34), is often recounted to help explain the communication of curative efficacy from patient to healer. In this classic account of contagion, a woman with a seemingly incurable discharge of blood boldly makes her way through the dense throng following Jesus, reaching out her expectant hand to touch Jesus, the healer. Immediately upon contact with the “hem of his garment,” a healing virtue, or power, is communicated into the woman’s body. Both patient and healer simultaneously register this tactile contact: as the woman experiences a newfound sensation of somatic wellbeing, Jesus feels power leaving his body (see the above illustration from Oral Roberts’ famous 1950 treatise, If You Need Healing Do These Things). Given the significant place that this account holds in the theology and technique of charismatic faith healing, I would like to briefly explore this question: If the woman with an “issue” were to seek healing in the late modern context, how would she negotiate her way through the crowd to make contact with the healer?

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October 16, 2013

Is Yoga Not Even a Hundred Years Old?

[Editor’s Note: Part of an occasional series about yoga and its origins.]

In 2009, the noted Dutch anthropologist (and New Directions in the Study of Prayer Advisory Committee member) Peter van der Veer published, in the journal Social Research, an article devoted to explaining the origins of modern spirituality. Committed to Talal Asad’s call for an “anthropology of secularism” and riding on the coattails of Charles Taylor’s Secular Age, van der Veer argued that modern spirituality first emerged in the West during the second half of the nineteenth-century, as an alternative to traditional religion fueled by the “secularization of the western mind.”  In search of alternatives to institutionalized Christianity, the nineteenth-century witnessed the rise of various movements—Transcendentalism, Christian Science, Theosophy—hoping to discover a universal spirituality agreeable to the modern intellectual palate.

The desire to look beyond the conventional in pursuit of the spiritual, according to van der Veer, was enabled by western imperialism, which paved the way for Euro-American encounters with Indian and Chinese spiritualities. These were eventually reimagined and transformed to go beyond the dogmatism of Christianity. Engendered by the interaction between metropole and colony, the oppressed and the oppressor both played a part in the creation of a new spirituality—thus van der Veer’s startling conclusion that modern spirituality is incomprehensible apart from the expansion of European power. This, like much of the recent literature devoted to the anthropological turn to the secular, also suggests that contemporary notions of spirituality and religion are rooted in the not-so-distant past.

A recent Der Spiegel piece by Manfred Dworschak, entitled “Salvation Without a Savior” (Erlösung ohne Erlöser), nicely illustrates how van der Veer has recently applied these insights to the history of yoga in North America and Europe. The first half of the article centers on the significance of Swami Vivekananda’s speech at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

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September 30, 2013

Psychology Today Blog Debuts

Pray for Me,” the new Psychology Today blog featuring posts about prayer research and discussions from the New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, is up and running. The first post on praying atheists is featured in the magazine’s “essential reads.”

Kevin Ladd has contributed a wonderful piece on how prayer is more than a slot machine. It will run soon. Others by me and interested New Directions in the Study of Prayer participants will follow. Some posts may extend into pieces for the Psychology Today print edition, as well.

Headlined “Do Atheists Pray?,” the first post is the first of several on the prayers of those who don’t believe.

Do atheists and agnostics pray? Yes, indeedy. Quite a bit it turns out. Six percent of them pray every day, we’re told by the Pew Research Center. And 11 percent pray weekly or monthly.

If no one is there, you might ask, who are they praying to? Let me guess.

Read the rest of the post, here. And drop by “Pray for Me” regularly for the latest installments.

September 23, 2013

The Prayers of Flannery O’Connor

It was a delightful coincidence to be rereading Augustine’s Confessions in preparation for a fall course when the September 16 issue of the New Yorker appeared with an excerpt from a forthcoming collection, edited by W.A. Sessions, of a prayer journal kept by Flannery O’Connor as a young writer in the University of Iowa’s MFA program. Judging from the excerpt, The Prayer Journal promises to be as engaging for those interested in practices of prayer as it will certainly be for those more interested in O’Connor as a writer and as a devout Catholic writer at that, though both certainly bear on the construction of prayer practice as presented in the journal.

Speaking toward the end of her life of the relationship of writing and belief, O’Connor insisted that the creative process for her, as it was for Augustine, was about constructing a concreteness in the ethereal experience of the divine-human encounter. “The ma­jor part of my task is to make everything,” she wrote, “even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible. The novelist begins his work where human knowledge begins—with the senses; he works through the limitations of matter… he has to stay within the concrete possibilities of his culture.”

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September 13, 2013

Tongues

[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.]

This is an excerpt from a recent recording of The Jackson Memorial Hour, a live gospel radio program broadcast each Sunday from a station in Virginia (thanks to Sister Dorothy and Brother Aldie Allen for providing me with recordings of their broadcast).This station’s transmission reaches into portions of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Although it may come to some as a surprise, small AM/FM radio stations such as this broadcast live Pentecostal and charismatic Christian worship services to millions of listeners throughout the United States.

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September 13, 2013

Hip Hip Hooray for Kuhn

[Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series in which New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantees reflect on their interdisciplinary conversations about the study of prayer. The series began with Charles Hirschkind’s “Cognition and Culture, at it Again!“.]

For me the most telling point in the exchange about interdisciplinary dialogue is Charles Hirschkind’s reference to Thomas Kuhn, who by forever smashing our innocent faith in the impartiality of scientific findings, restored other kinds of inquiry to a somewhat more equal footing. Journalistically speaking (which is the only platform I have): Hip hip hooray for Kuhn, he’s a jolly good fellow! He gave us back a thousand colors.

Our skepticism when it comes to academic findings about prayer is of course heightened by the nature of the subject itself and by the fact that any finding is so prone to being immediately seized upon and politicized by believers and nonbelievers.

That academics are politicizing the subject in their own way and with such fervor is a nice sidelight, speaking again journalistically. And, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, it does seem to come from somewhat the same psychological place.

So what all this amounts to is just another story of human nature. We all have our Gods and we all protect them fiercely. But luckily, the universe of the mind is limitless. There’s room for everybody’s object of adoration. (Arguably, of course.)

August 22, 2013

A Life With God in Prayer

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.

August 2, 2013

The Apparatus of Belief

[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 key element in the practice of charismatic Christian healing prayer is the operation of a “spiritual gift” (charism) that allows the pray-er to discern the presence of illness-causing demons. Practitioners of faith healing often describe this “gift of discernment” specifically in terms of a divinely augmented sense of touch that allows the healer to detect the presence of unseen agents of illness within the body of the patient. Through this gift of the spirit, the sensory capacities of the mortal flesh are quickened with a preternatural capacity to sense the presence of that which, under everyday sensory regimes, persists undetected. Prominent faith healers such as William Branham, A. A. Allen, and Oral Roberts described this haptic quickening as a special sensation of “pressure,” “heat,” “electricity,” and “vibration” registered through the hand. The gift of discernment, therefore, is a divine prosthesis that allows the human hand to detect the spirit during the therapeutic performance of prayer.

The divinely attuned capacities of the body, however, are not the only media for the detection of the spirit. Artificial devices and material objects have also played a crucial role in the discernment of sacred presence, and reveal striking homologies with the specifically somatic gift previously described. Take for example the sensitive capacities of the camera’s mechanical eye, simultaneously revealing sacred structures and organizing particular experiences of “belief” for the viewer. More specifically, mass circulated Pentecostal magazines included photographs that were described as having registered sacred presences unavailable to the naked eye (see illustration from A. A. Allen’s Miracle Magazine). As an influential precursor to Pentecostalism, the “spirit photography” of nineteenth century American Spiritualism also relied heavily upon the camera and the photographic plate to reveal spectral forces circulating beyond the capacities of everyday sensation.

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July 17, 2013

After the Zimmerman Verdict, What Are They Praying?

In my ongoing scrutiny of  how the media deals with prayer, the George Zimmerman acquittal was a chance to look at public prayers during a racial crisis. The resulting piece ran in She the People, a blog of The Washington Post.

In the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, there has been anger, protests, marches — and everywhere, an outpouring of prayers.

Are those prayers being wielded as an alternative, non-violent weapon? Are they meant to pacify? Just what is it, I wondered, that those responding prayerfully are asking of God?

Read the full piece here.

July 15, 2013

What To Do With Empathy

Paul Bloom’s recent New Yorker essay, “The Baby in the Well,” has created a small internet stir by calling out the many vices rather than the oft heralded virtues of empathy—a major academic and self-help trend. Bloom’s basic criticism can be summed as follows: empathy distracts us from what really matters since it requires feeling or relating to the situation of others to necessitate social/political action; such feelings are typically directed at concerns of relative insignificance when compared to situations of dire importance that fail to engender much empathy. Hence Bloom’s point that empathy justified the millions of dollars in charitable donations given to the relatively affluent community of Sandy Hook, despite the fact that almost twenty million American children go to bed hungry each night.

But does Bloom really believe that it is foolish to empathize with the pain of others? Some see in Bloom’s position this very thing, namely an overly rational take on human relations which they label “anti-empathy.” For these critics Bloom is missing the larger point: the power that empathy has to facilitate human solidarity in the hope of creating a better world.

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July 12, 2013

Holy Ghost Amplification

[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.]

Emphasizing their capacity to hear and respond to prayer, representations of the gods in the ancient world often depicted deities with disproportionately large ears. The popular Pentecostal paraphrase from the book of Isaiah (59:1) gives a more contemporary resonance to this ancient motif, “His ears are not too heavy to hear the cries of his people.” Among many Pentecostal communities in the United States and elsewhere, performances of communal prayer that produce an excess of sonic intensity are believed to be more effective in opening communicative relays between the sacred and the everyday. This production of “numinous noise” emerges not only from techniques of the body such as breath, posture, rhythmic schemas, and other modulations of the voice, but a body-in-prayer that is amplified and extended by technologies of sound reproduction such as the microphone and the loudspeaker.

On a basic structural level, the “loudspeaker” is itself a technical reproduction of glossolalia (unintelligible language), one of the most important forms of prayer in the Pentecostal tradition. Focusing upon technological terms such as “loudspeaker,” theorists of the radio apparatus have commented upon the fact that early devices of sound amplification not only mimicked human organs of vocalization, but produced uncanny sensations of doubled immediacy between a voice that emerged from within the apparatus, yet simultaneously resided in some displaced elsewhere. Like glossolalia (literally a tongue that is moved by forces radically exterior to the religious subject), the “speaker” creates a particular experiential intensity precisely because it seems to produce an unmediated presence, yet is animated by forces that are distant or displaced from the artificial apparatus of sound production. 

One possible approach to the technological history of prayer, therefore, would be organized by the techniques employed for the displacement and amplification of the voice. These technologies for the displacement of the voice (as if the voice were not always fleeting!), moreover, could be tracked not only within the space of the auditory, but across a range of sensory experiences that are enabled and extended through the process of technological reproduction. Techniques of ventriloquism, the ritual manipulation of the mouth through the mask, speaking tubes, and electronic amplifiers could all be invoked, among many others, in this particular technical history of divine communication

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July 3, 2013

Prayer Cards and Prayer Line

[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.]

James Bielo’s recent essay on walking prayer inspired me to think about other instances of prayer and communal peregrination in the history of American Christianity, especially the “prayer line.” In terms of mass crowd phenomena and the spatial organization of bodies during the performance of prayer, the prayer line was one of the most significant twentieth century manifestations of communal prayer. During the charismatic tent revivals of the 1940’s and 50’s, the prayer lines became so massive that certain techniques were adopted to organize the multitudes in need of healing prayer. Structuring the throngs within the space of the giant canvas tent, “prayer card” systems helped organize the potentially excessive revival crowds into single-file lines that followed the inner perimeter of the revival tent and ended in a serialized passage across the elevated platform of the healer.

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July 1, 2013

Wendy Davis in Texas: Calling Out

The New Directions in the Study of Prayer project has broadened my thinking about the forms that prayer can take. As I watched fellow Texan Wendy Davis’ filibuster lat week, I had the feeling that something more than political was taking place. Religion Dispatches ran my piece yesterday:

I was surprised that the sight of her stirred such deep feeling in me—and in so many other people.

Fifty-year-old Wendy Davis looked so small standing before the Texas Senate last week in her pink sneakers, blonde hair falling softly around her face, filibustering to stop passage of a law that would have closed most abortion clinics in Texas. Her voice was so soft that I kept thinking, “That voice cannot last for 13 hours.” But it did.

 The rest of the article is available here.

June 26, 2013

Stephen Colbert's Mother's Prayer

Lorna Colbert | Screen cap from  Season 9 Episode 116 of the Colbert ReportStephen Colbert’s mother died last week at 92.  His tribute to her includes a glimpse of how profoundly meaningful the simplest, most private acts of prayer can be. In her last years, Lorna Colbert became a little confused, he tells us. And so people who loved her would ask her simple questions to help her remember. Tucked among all that she had forgotten was the vivid memory of a prayer she said while tucking her children in at night.

His account caused me to reflect on how rare it is to see a completely genuine moment reflected in the media.  We have become so accustomed to being watchers who are being watched that nothing ever seems quite pure of intent. But this little story did.

June 25, 2013

Praying Nonbelievers

In a similar vein as Elizabeth Drescher’s NDSP research, Michelle Boorstein at The Washington Post writes of a documented rise in praying atheists or “nonbelievers.”

Boorstein interviews atheists and researchers alike who report praying despite their atheist beliefs. One of the atheists, Sigfried Gold, “took up prayer out of desperation,” and has created his own goddess, who even appears in drawings about his house. The key to his goddess, is that despite the detailed vision of her appearance, she doesn’t exist.  

Historian, Gordon Melton, who studies new American religions, reports increased organization among atheists in the last decade, despite their varied views on the supernatural.

“It’s only been recently that people who are atheists said, ‘One can do spirituality in an atheist context,’” Melton said. “We’re getting more comfortable with idiosyncratic behaviors [in general], mixing things we’d not think of as going together. We see people are kind of making up their own religions as they go along…When we think of people sitting in the pews we shouldn’t think of them homogeneously; they are all over the fields – they just aren’t voicing it.

In order to better understand how atheists might approach “prayer,” Boorstein suggests that there are several questions that need answering first:

…what exactly do theists mean when they say they believe in God, to whom to they pray, and how do they feel the benefits from prayer happen? How would atheists who describe themselves as spiritual define the word? And how do the 6 percent of self-described atheists who pray define the practice?

Read more here.

June 13, 2013

Faith on Film

[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.]

Underneath the massive cloth architecture of Oral Roberts’ canvas cathedral, the “world’s first healing film” was screened for a crusade audience of over 10,000 on September 29th, 1952. Venture Into Faith is a compilation of actual archival footage shot earlier that year during a healing crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, woven seamlessly into highly produced scenes recorded in a Hollywood studio. The climax of the film, for example, features the miraculous cure of a tubercular boy named David through a performance of prayer. Although the actual performance of this healing prayer was performed by Oral Roberts and a group of professional actors, the final edited version of this spectacle of divine communication oscillates between “live” archival footage shot during a healing campaign and rehearsed “acting” recorded under the careful orchestration of a Hollywood director (1:23:39 in film).

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