Praying /P astoralC are/S pirituality (original) (raw)
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In the Name Of Legitimate Interactants in Prayer
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Reviews in Religion & Theology
Within the introduction to the extended essays which populate this volume, Giordan presents prayer as common across religious traditions, and considers it equally as an act for those who do not necessarily consider themselves religious or practising. Prayer is thus described as 'a source of power beyond what is normal' (p.4). This volume contains a variety of case studies and exploring the diversity of both public and private aspects of prayer. Chapter one discusses the social practice of prayer. Carlo Genova offers an interpretive proposal of prayer, referencing Marcel Mauss's seminal text On Prayer. Genova sees prayer as an 'action instrument' in which an individual attempts to influence the divine, thus prayer combines the practice of acting and thinking. Whereas prayer may be configured as personal and individual, Genova explores how it is a social act too.
The social life of prayers – introduction
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In this introduction the theme of prayer is brought into an anthropological discussion. Attending to prayers and how they are performed and seen to intervene in a social world is a significant way to engage with matters close to people. As argued in this introduction, prayers are a way to map affect and affective relationships people hold in what they are oriented towards and care about. Here a social perspective on prayer taking its cue from Marcel Mauss is particularly relevant as it invites us to go beyond the individual and see how prayers always point to a broader landscape. The reason for honing in on the social life of prayers is that it entices a particular form of situated comparison of diverse forms of Christianity that thereby pushes the anthropology of Christianity to consider central questions of agency, responsibility and subjectivity. This introduction argues that attending to the social life of prayers can be seen as a way of mapping affect. Prayers in different ways attest to the implicatedness of human beings in a social world. Furthermore, prayer works as a didactic tool and is in itself an internal scale of comparison and evaluation in various Christian formulations.
The prayer companion: openness and specificity, materiality and spirituality
Proceedings of the …, 2010
In this paper we describe the Prayer Companion, a device we developed as a resource for the spiritual activity of a group of cloistered nuns. The device displays a stream of information sourced from RSS news feeds and social networking sites to suggest possible topics for prayers. The nuns have engaged with the device enthusiastically over the first ten months of an ongoing deployment, and, notwithstanding some initial irritation with the balance of content, report that it plays a significant and continuing role in their prayer life. We discuss how we balanced specificity in the design with a degree of openness for interpretation to create a resource that the nuns could both understand and appropriate, describe the importance of materiality to the device's successful adoption, consider its implications as a design for older people, and reflect on the example it provides of how computation may serve spirituality.
Davening and Meaning: a philosophical analysis of liturgical prayer
This is an updated synopsis of work in progress, taking shape as a book, in which I propose a theory of liturgical prayer, aiming to explain what one is doing when praying from liturgy and what value this act could have. I suggest that Jewish liturgical prayer, particularly, is the practitioner’s participation in a millennial project, in which she delivers to God a scripted address on behalf of the historical body of Israel.
Prayer and symbolisation in an Irish Catholic community1
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The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of prayer in the everyday life of an Irish Catholic community. Prayers are mental acts that need to be actualised following detailed instructions. This is so because prayers have to be "authentic", which means that there has to be a correspondence between the act of praying and the mental state of believing. Due to the fact that mental states are by definition invisible, the argument of this paper is that that correspondence can only be symbolised by the very special characteristics of the act of praying. By stressing the symbolic nature of the act of praying, an alternative to recent cognitive approaches to the analysis of ritualisation is also suggested.
Introduction: Connected with God: Body, the Social, and the Transcendent. 2016
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The special issue Connected with God: Body, the Social, and the Transcendent addresses the very topical question of the architecture of religious, especially Christian, experiences. Specifically, it examines the processes in which Christians experience the connection with, and gain knowledge of, God in and through the body, and, in particular, the role of social relatedness and morality in generating and informing these experiences. The issue challenges the view of an individual subjective relationship with God, and argues that Christian experiences of God’s presence are not solely a matter of an individual’s relationship with the divine but are very much made possible, guided, and conceptualised through corporeal relationships with social others – believers and other fellow-humans. Through detailed ethnographic and historical examination, the issue also addresses the question of whether and how the form of Christianity practised influences people’s experiences of divine presence.
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Resistance to reflect on the changing nature of religious practice in the contemporary world. It draws on Comaroff's method, which situates "religion" in a complex social, economic, and political field that is itself in the process of unfolding. Using Hindu practices among Indian IT workers in the diaspora as a case in point, the paper suggests that the forms of techo-scientific labor that IT workers are involved in demands certain types of religious practice that discipline mind and body. At the same time, engaging in those practices opens up challenges to dominant tropes around religious belief and worker disposition, since it creates critical spaces for reflection in the
Afterword: religious infrastructure or doing religion in the contemporary mode
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Written as a response to a collection of essays that proposes to think infrastructurally about religion, this Afterword builds on Paul Rabinow’s reflections on an ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ to highlight how infrastructural thinking can strengthen our understanding of religion in a late-modern, logistically saturated and hyperconnected ecumene. This essay explores three forms in which religiously connoted sociotechnical arrangements contribute to the shaping of the present kairos (‘fitting time’, or shared moment) as infrastructures of contemporariness, coevality, and contemporaneousness. In Rabinowian terms, contemporariness encompasses modernity and its mythology, while outpacing it at the same time: thus, religious infrastructures outpace the modernist myth of secularity while thriving on the technical utopias of high modernity. Coevality refers to how the ‘infrastructuring’ of religious life synchronises imagined pasts, presents, and futures through vectors of connectivity, consolidation, and enablement. Contemporaneousness refers to how religious-infrastructural sociotechnical assemblages bracket different domains and spheres of activity – locality, globality, economy, spirituality, leisure, etc. – making them overlap, often with exhilarating/empowering outcomes, but, sometimes, with disruptive or uncanny results.