Wholistic prayer

The author has experimented with an approach to prayer in which he draws on insights and methods from contemporary psychotherapy. He calls his approach wholistic prayer and defines it as the movement, the lifting up, of the person-body, heart, mind, and will-towards God. He characterizes wholistic prayer, discusses problems associated with its practice, describes its stages, and illustrates the use of dreams. He provides clinical data from participants in classes on prayer and from his own experience.He teaches classes in prayer both in the parish and in the Logos Institute of Chicago Theological Seminary.     

Pastoral counseling and petitionary prayer

Petitionary prayer is a valid and often-used form of prayer among religious people. Not infrequently, pastoral counselors find themselves praying for clients. This article explores the pastoral counselor's use of petitionary prayer, experientially and theologically, and attempts to locate its meaning within the healing enterprise.     

Interreligious prayer between Christians and Muslims

This article distinguishes various ways in which the term ‘pray together’ might be understood and focuses on ‘interreligious prayer’, by which is meant here praying together using the same words with two religious groups united in heart and mind, rather than ‘multireligious prayer’, which refers to prayer in the presence of another religious group. The article argues that, in the early literature on the matter, there is a danger of conflating the two different types, and then shows that some Catholic communities, following the initiatives of Pope John Paul II, have reached a consensus that interreligious prayer is problematic, while multireligious prayer is not. The article goes on to consider an essay by Joseph Ratzinger, which discusses the preconditions for interreligious prayer and is very sceptical about its possibility, except perhaps for Christians and Jews. Finally, one of Ratzinger's preconditions for interreligious prayer is used to examine the possible grounds for interreligious prayer between Christians and Muslims, and the article argues that the door is as yet neither closed nor open.     

Transitional phenomena as evidenced in prayer

In this paper, we demonstrate that the study of prayer facilitates understanding of the deeply personal object related nature of religious experience. Within prayer, individuals enter the transitional sphere and meet their God representation. Both conscious and unconscious aspects of prayer can be made available through the use of a projective test developed by the authors, known as STARR: Spiritual Themes and Religious Responses test. The data obtained suggest the usefulness of Winnicottian concepts of transitional phenomena, playing, communicating, and capacity to be alone as a contemporary psychoanalytic framework for interpreting religious experience.