Faith in Practice

Does prayer work? What research has found

A short answer that is more interesting than yes or no.

Prayer and the body: what science measures

What happens between your skull and your soles when you pray, according to the people with the equipment.

Studies on prayer: a guide to what's been measured

Five decades of research, sorted by what the data actually shows.

What it means to say prayer works

The question depends almost entirely on what "works" is taken to mean. Christians and skeptics often answer the same words with different definitions and then disagree about the answer.

How to pray: a practical guide

What two thousand years of practitioners agree on, and where they part company.

What is contemplative prayer

The Christian practice that has been quietly producing what Buddhist meditation researchers measure for fifteen hundred years.

How to pray the Jesus Prayer

A short practical guide to a fifteen-hundred-year-old discipline that has quietly become one of the most-practiced forms of contemplative prayer in the world.

Can you make up your own prayer?

The Christian tradition has always said yes, and has had specific advice on how to do it well for nearly two thousand years.

How to write a prayer

Seven principles the Christian tradition has settled on across two thousand years.

Prayers for everyday moments

Twelve editorial prayers for situations the historical tradition does not directly cover, written as worked examples of the seven principles.

Praying in your own words

The Christian practice of extempore prayer goes back further than most modern Christians realize, and it has produced some of the best prayer writing in any language.

A short history of Christian prayer

Two thousand years in roughly fifteen minutes, with the interesting bits foregrounded.

Who wrote the Serenity Prayer?

The answer is Reinhold Niebuhr, the evidence is good, and the story of how the question stayed open for fifty years is worth knowing.

Why Christian prayers come in different forms across traditions

The same God, the same Bible, the same Christ, and four major traditions that pray in very different ways. The reasons are historical, theological, and more interesting than most people expect.