Life-Prolonging Killings and their Relevance to Ethics

What makes killing morally wrong? And what makes killing morally worse than letting die? Standard answers to these two questions presuppose that killing someone involves shortening that person's life. Yet, as I argue in the first two sections of this article, this presupposition is false: Life-prolonging killings are conceivable. In the last two sections of the article, I explore the significance of the conceivability of such killings for various discussions of the two questions just mentioned. In particular, I show why the conceivability of life-prolonging killings renders Frances M. Kamm's attempt to provide an answer to the second question problematic.     

The Assembly as the Body of Christ: A Case Against the Omission of LBW's Offertory Prayers

Abstract : This article examines the offertory prayers in ELW, comparing them to the two prayers found in LBW. The author argues that the prayers in ELW have lost the spirituality of stewardship suggested by the prayers in LBW, and no longer maintain the important connection to Pauline theology, whereby the Christian understands his/her whole life, including time, talents, and money, to be offered back to God as a living sacrifice.     

Children’s prayers from a Hospital Chapel

Children’s prayers, from prayer books left in the Chapel of a Children’s Hospital between 1998 and 2002, were studied for what the children’s God-talk would reveal about their perceptions of God. Of the 3893 prayers written during this period, 346 were confidently identified as being authored by children. The sample of 346 prayers, which gave rise to 558 expressions of prayer, was explored through a content analysis, used quantitatively to summarise and describe the data, and a thematic analysis, informed by methods from Grounded Theory. The psychological and spiritual significance of the prayers is drawn out, demonstrating the richness and relationality of children’s spirituality. The predominance of prayers written by female writers, suggests that the extent to which relationality is present is related to gender. Questions concerning possible gender-related differences in girls’ and boys’ spirituality are raised and implications for practice are considered.     

When Prayers Go Unanswered

Many Americans believe God answers prayers, but scholars know little about how individuals handle situations in which they perceive that prayers have gone unanswered. Using data from an in‐depth interview project with current and former victims of intimate partner violence, I argue that perceived unanswered prayers cause challenges to belief systems that elicit attribution processes—or cognitive processes through which individuals try to explain the causes of actors’ behavior—whose outcomes are explanations for why God did not answer their prayers. I find that the outcomes of these attribution processes are God‐serving justifications, or attributions of God's perceived unanticipated or problematic behavior that define this behavior as appropriate to the situation. God‐serving justifications for unanswered prayers fall into three types: (1) appeal to higher loyalties, (2) affirmation of benefits, and (3) denial of the pray‐er. I conclude with a discussion of the implications and limitations of the analysis.     

‘I download my prayer schedule’: exploring the technological mediation of Islamic religious practice at work

The practice of daily prayers in Islam and how observances such as Ramadan fall each year follow specific solar or lunar calendars different from the Gregorian calendar of UK work places. Identifying the time for daily prayers and finding a place to practise is a skilled activity requiring ways to ascertain the correct (and changing) time and a place in which prayer can take place. In the absence of traditional mediation such as the call to prayer broadcast from a local mosque, new, often technologically innovative, approaches are being adopted. This paper reports on a study of how Muslims practise and negotiate the difficulties of performing daily prayers in a UK university. Though technological mediation is a significant aspect of daily prayers, it is but one part of a complex practice which often involves multiple technologies and multiple ways of working.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli's Preces sacrae (1564) and the Problem of Prayers as Historical Sources

This article combines a study of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Sacred Prayers with a methodological concern for the particular challenges involved in coming to grips with prayers as historical sources. It demonstrates that in the reception history of Vermigli’s prayers there has been a recurring tendency to read them as something other than prayers, a commentary on the Psalms for instance. By contrast, this article attends to the specificity of their genre and form as prayers. This approach leads, first, to a fresh appreciation of the Preces sacrae as a rare and revealing source of their kind, since not many prayers offered before lectures in sixteenth-century Protestant universities have survived; secondly, to the discovery of important, as yet unknown connections between Vermigli’s Preces sacrae and Wolfgang Capito’s Precationes; and thirdly to an understanding of the spiritual depth of the Preces sacrae going beyond their propositional theological content.     

Sin, sickness, and salvation.

This article seeks to provide commentary and rationale for Orthodox Christian rites and prayers for the sick as found in the Euchologion, or Book of Needs. The reader needs to understand that the prayers of the Orthodox Church prayed at times of sickness and suffering will often strike the non-Orthodox as harsh and even unjust. References to God willing suffering do not sit well with most Western Christians. However, this is the Orthodox Christian belief, and it is expressed in the prayers of the Orthodox Church. Sickness and suffering are understood to be avenues of salvation and a participation in the glory and joys of the resurrection of Christ and life in the Kingdom of God. This is why the Orthodox Church teaches her faithful to accept suffering as something that has the potential to bring them further along in the process of theosis.     

Puzzling cases about killing and letting die.

Discussions of euthanasia often appeal to the distinction between killing people and letting them die. Favor asks whether this distinction is morally important--in particular, whether killing is worse than merely letting someone die, even when the motivations and consequences are the same. She explores our moral intuitions via a discussion of various subtly different hypothetical examples.     

Pope Francis: a pastor according to the heart of Christ

Catholic Canon Law stipulates that the Pope is ‘the pastor of the universal Church on earth’. Pope Francis took up the challenge which this statement poses to those exercising the Petrine ministry by asking for prayers that he might be ‘a pastor according to the heart of Christ’. How is a Pope ‘a pastor according to the heart of Christ’? What particular opportunities does the Petrine ministry offer for this? What are the pastoral aspects of the papacy? What does it seem we can expect from Pope Francis in this regard? As this article shows, the task of ‘a pastor according to the heart of Christ’ has an impact on several aspects of the implementation of the Petrine ministry, such as using the Pope’s power in the service of unity, encouraging collegiality in communion as the visible centre of the entire Christian Church in dialogue with other religions, that the world may believe.     

Assessing the Relationships Among Prayer Expectancies, Race, and Self-Esteem in Late Life

When people pray, they have certain beliefs or expectations about the nature of the response they hope to receive. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between two specific prayer expectancies and self-esteem with data provided by a nationwide survey of older adults. The first has to do with the timing of answers to prayers while the second involves the ways prayers are answered. The data suggest that feelings of self-worth are highest when older people believe that only God knows when it is best to answer a prayer, and only God knows the best way to answer it. In contrast, self-esteem tends to be lower among older adults who believe prayers are answered right away and believe they get exactly what they ask for. However, further analysis reveals that the benefits of prayer expectancies are more evident among older African Americans than among older whites.     

Is Killing No Worse Than Letting Die?

ABSTRACT Those who wish to refute the view that it is worse to kill than to let die sometimes produce examples of cases in which an agent lets someone die but would be generally agreed to be no less reprehensible than if he had killed. It is argued that the examples produced typically possess a feature which makes their use in this context illegitimate, and that when modified to remove this feature, they provide support for the view which they were designed to undermine.     

Prayer,Patronage, and Personal Agency in Nicaraguan Accounts of Receiving International Aid

This article examines how religious beliefs and practices influence the reception of international relief and development aid in impoverished communities. Specifically, I explain how Nicaraguan recipients’ prayers both enhance and constrain their ability to assert themselves as “empowered” actors during aid interactions. Data come from observations and interviews over a two‐year period with 81 Nicaraguans in communities that receive aid from Christian development organizations. Compared to secular constructions of aid interactions, prayers provide space for Nicaraguans to position themselves as influential actors effecting change for themselves or their families. Through prayers, recipients portray themselves as influencing the actions of more powerful parties, including God and potential donors. They also pray for donors’ well‐being, thereby offering spiritual reciprocity for material gifts. However, the same prayers that empower individuals at the interpersonal level constrain their ability to envision transformation of social structures. These findings shape understandings of prayer as aligning actions, of the moral and social dimensions of receiving care from strangers, and of the complex and contradictory ways religious practices influence discourses of empowerment and development.     

50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk

This article presents a narrative analysis of 18 Muslims' prayer experiences. The results of the study showed that experiences of answered prayers are structured by collective narratives and refer to other texts in the religious tradition. The narratives have important social and individualizing functions that help them remain Muslims in modern society. The informants reported that they had experienced situations when they had prayed but did not receive what they requested. They did not, however, mediate any well-formed narratives about these experiences, primarily because of a lack of collective narratives structuring the event in this way. The analysis showed, furthermore, that the informants used four strategies in order to transform the experience of unanswered prayers into answered prayers. The analysis concludes that prayer experiences are fluid phenomena "located" in the interplay between individual, text, and context.     

Whose idea is it anyway? The importance of reputation in acknowledgement

Six‐year‐old children negatively evaluate plagiarizers just as adults do (Olson & Shaw, 2011), but why do they dislike plagiarizers? Children may think plagiarism is wrong because plagiarizing negatively impacts other people's reputations. We investigated this possibility by having 6‐ to 9‐year‐old children evaluate people who shared their own or other people's ideas (stories). In Experiment 1, we found that children consider it acceptable to retell someone else's story if the source is given credit for their story (improving the source's reputation), but not if the reteller claims credit for the story (steals credit away from someone else). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that children do not consider it bad to lie by giving someone else credit for one's own good story (improving someone else's reputation), but do consider it bad to give someone else credit for one's own bad story (improving one's own reputation at the expense of someone else's). Experiment 4 demonstrated that children think it is equally bad to take credit for someone else's idea for oneself as it is to take someone else's idea and give credit to someone else, suggesting that children dislike when others take credit away from someone else, regardless of whether or not it improves the plagiarizer's reputation. Our results suggest that children dislike plagiarism because it negatively affects others' reputations by taking credit away from them.     

Trust and Trustworthiness

What is it to trust someone? What is it for someone to be trustworthy? These are the two main questions that this paper addresses. There are various situations that can be described as ones of trust, but this paper considers the issue of trust between individuals. In it, I suggest that trust is distinct from reliance or cases where someone asks for something on the expectation that it will be done due to the different attitude taken by the trustor. I argue that the trustor takes Holton’s ‘participant stance’ and this distinguishes trust from reliance. I argue that trustworthiness is different from reliability and that an account of trustworthiness cannot be successful whilst ignoring the point that aligning trustworthiness with reliability removes the virtue from being trustworthy. On the question of what it is distinguishes trustworthiness from reliability, I argue that the distinction is in the opportunity for the trustee to act against the wishes of the trustor and the trustee’s consideration of the value of the trust that has been placed in them by the trustor.     

Pray Tell: The Who, What, Why, and How of Prayer Across Multiple Faiths

Although prayer is one of the most common chaplain interventions, there is a dearth of information pertaining to prayer in the chaplaincy literature. This study was therefore conducted to obtain basic information from professional chaplains about their use of prayer with patients. Eight professional chaplains participated in a 90-min focus group to discuss, among other things, the nature of chaplain prayers, the context in which they prayed, and who should initiate prayer. They also discussed differing religious perspectives about prayer, the strengths and limitations of different types of prayers, and praying with patients from concordant or discordant faiths.     

Christian Prayer and the Local Congregation: A Social Analysis of Individual Prayer Petitions

Abstract

Prayer requests from members and attendees of a progressive Christian church located in a large American City was the subject of this investigation. This church serves congregants from Roman Catholic and Protestant backgrounds, and a large, but not exclusively gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender community. ap Siôn’s study of prayer typology and subject contents from rural England influenced this investigation. This study used computer technology and document analysis to categorize 8,059 individual prayer card requests submitted between 2014-2018 from church members and attendees. Results showed the most common prayer requests were “Thanks and Thanksgiving” prayers with “Praise and Adoration” prayers among the least common. Few references to sin and forgiveness were found. The most frequently mentioned subjects of prayers were those referencing personal needs and concerns. Findings and comparison with ap Siôn and other research suggest these prayer requests demonstrate the social and theological cohesiveness of Christian prayer. Additional research is suggested comparing Christian prayer with prayers in other religions and how prayer behaviors interact with the rise of multiculturalism in society.     

Patterns of Change in Prayer Activity,Expectancies, and Contents During Older Adulthood

Prayer is the most common form of religious practice and a central part of religious experience, yet little is known about whether individuals’ prayer activities and beliefs tend to remain stable or develop over the life course. This study examines change during the course of older adulthood in a range of dimensions of prayer, including total frequency of private prayer, specific beliefs and expectancies regarding prayer, and the contents of prayers. Data come from four waves of an ongoing longitudinal survey of Christian older adults, covering a period of seven years. Growth curve analysis was used to model patterns of within‐person change in these factors. Linear increase was observed in total prayer frequency and in beliefs about prayer emphasizing placing trust in God over expecting immediate rewards. Frequency of prayer increased for all types of prayer contents, including prayers for others, for God's will, in thanksgiving, for guidance, for health, and for material goods. Only the belief that one's prayers are answered remained stable during the course of the study. Results highlight the dynamic nature of prayer beliefs and behaviors in late life, and partially support a pattern of growing faith maturity.     

Political Ecumenism and 1968

The political night prayers in Cologne were a project that reflected the politicization and ecumenism that occupied the Christian confessions in 1968, not only in Uppsala. They were an attempt to consistently bring public policy and faith together. A large group of organizers, influenced by the work of women intellectuals, held monthly services that dealt with current issues. They were distinguished by the information they provided and by discussions, which aimed at stimulating meditation and concrete actions. The services attracted up to a thousand participants and became well known throughout Germany. The political night prayers encountered resistance from church leaders and conservative theologians. In this project, ecumenism was realized as local political ecumenism.     

The experiential problem for petitionary prayer

Sometimes people petition God for things through prayer. This is puzzling, because if God always does what is best, it is not clear how these prayers can make a difference to what God does. Difference-Making accounts of petitionary prayer attempt to explain how these prayers can nonetheless influence what God does. I argue that, insofar as one is motivated to endorse a Difference-Making Account because they want to respect widespread intuitions about this feature of petitionary prayer, they should also be motivated to endorse an account of prayer that respects widespread intuitions about other central features of petitionary prayer. I describe three problematic cases and the intuitions we have about them, and show how these intuitions restrict any Difference-Making account of petitionary prayer.