Books & Culture on new books on prayer
I work at a place where we meet every Monday morning, share prayer requests, and pray together before going over the week’s schedule. Sometimes I wonder what an outsider would make of it all. And there are moments—we all have them, I think—when I feel like an outsider at prayer myself. Like every year, 2006 has brought shelves of new books on prayer. A couple of the most noteworthy will be reviewed by Lauren Winner in the January/February issue of Books & Culture, Philip Yancey’s Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (Zondervan) and David Crump’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer (BakerAcademic). But there are others worth reading to which we may not be able to give adequate attention. Let me mention two of these in particular, both of them collections of scholarly essays. The first is Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue: Studies in the History of Jewish Prayer, edited by Ruth Langer and Steven Fine (Eisenbrauns); the second is The Phenomenology of Prayer, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (Fordham Univ. Press).
Related
Interview with Claire Wolfteich on praying for justice, on our podcast
Interview with David Crump about his new book on prayer, forthcoming on our podcast
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