Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (original) (raw)

2012, Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion

No matter how you wish to define it, prayer is a valuable focus for understanding how people interpret themselves, others and the worldthis world and higher worlds-in which they live. It is a phenomenon which seems to be characteristic not only of participants in every religion, but also men and women who do not identify with traditional religions. It can be practised even by those who do not believe either in a God or transcendent force. In this sense, therefore, we may assert that the prayer is a typically human activity that has accompanied the development of different civilizations over the course of the centuries (Meslin 2003). The constant presence of such activity in human history inevitably raises many questions: why do people feel the need to pray? What are the reasons that lead people to persist in praying? In what ways do people pray? And what about the efficacy of praying: is it possible to demonstrate that it achieves its goals? Is prayer really able to change reality? Following the famous approach of Marcel Mauss (1968[1909]), according to whom prayer joins ritual and belief together and always has a social as well as personal dimension, we can argue that one of the primary things prayer does is to put people in touch with the symbolic universe that sustains the believer in a life of faith. It depends upon and reinforces representations of God, and at the same time opens up a way for an individual to understand his or her own existential conditions, life style, needs and aspirations. Both the material issues of concrete daily life as well as more symbolic elements expressed through words, gestures, body positions, and community celebration are brought together in the act of praying. To understand prayer we also have to understand the horizon within which it must be placed. The peculiarity of such human activity is the relationship between those who pray and the being(s) to whom prayer is addressed. Prayer implies the existence of an "otherness", that is powerful and meaningful. It may be personal or impersonal, but there is often a sense that it can receive and even understand and address the tasks and issues addressed to it. Such "higher power" is not necessarily a personal God: it may coincide with a universal, cosmic order, to which the References