Duffuor, Amy and Alana Harris. 2013. Politics as a Vocation: Prayer, Civic Engagement, and the Gendered Re-Enchantment of the City. …
Prayer
Brown, Candy Gunther. 2012. Testing Prayer: Science and Healing
Reviewed by Anna I. Corwin (UCLA). In 2010, Candy Gunther Brown and her research team published a compelling and controversial article in Southern Medical Journal arguing that proximate intercessory prayer, performed in their study by Pentecostals in Mozambique
Elisha, “Time and Place for Prayer”
Elisha, Omri. 2013. The Time and Place for Prayer: evangelical urbanism and citywide prayer movements. Religion 43(3): 312-330. Abstract: This …
Luhrmann, “Making God real and making God good: Some mechanisms through which prayer may contribute to healing”
Luhrmann, Tanya. 2013. Making God real and making God good: Some mechanisms through which prayer may contribute to healing. Transcultural Psychiatry …
Blanton “TV Prayer”
Blanton, Anderson. 2013. “TV Prayer.” Reverberations. http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2013/04/10/tv-prayer/ Excerpt: A pivotal moment in the technological history of prayer occurred when Oral Roberts introduced the …
Schram, “One mind: Enacting the Christian congregation among the Auhelawa”
Scrham, Ryan. 2013. One mind: Enacting the Christian congregation among the Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 24(1):30-47. Abstract: This …
Luhrmann and Morgain, “Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation”
Luhrmann, T.M. and Rachel Morgain. 2012. Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience. Ethos 40(4):359-389. …
Corwin, “Changing God, Changing Bodies: The Impact of New Prayer Practices on Elderly Catholic Nuns’ Embodied Experience”
Corwin, Anna (2012) “Changing God, Changing Bodies: The Impact of New Prayer Practices on Elderly Catholic Nuns’ Embodied Experience.” Ethos 40(4):390-410. …
Gunther Brown, “Testing Prayer”
Gunther Brown, Candy. 2012. Testing Prayer: Science and Healing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Publisher’s Description: When sickness strikes, people around …
Luhrmann, T.M. (2012) When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God Random House Digital, Inc.
Publisher’s Description: How does God become and remain real for modern evangelicals? How are rational, sensible people of faith able to experience the presence of a powerful yet invisible being and sustain that belief in an environment of overwhelming skepticism? T. M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist trained in psychology and the acclaimed author of Of Two Minds, explores the extraordinary process that leads some believers to a place where God is profoundly real and his voice can be heard amid the clutter of everyday thoughts.
While attending services and various small group meetings at her local branch of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Luhrmann sought to understand how some members were able to communicate with God, not just through one-sided prayers but with discernable feedback. Some saw visions, while others claimed to hear the voice of God himself. For these congregants and many other Christians, God was intensely alive. After holding a series of honest, personal interviews with Vineyard members who claimed to have had isolated or ongoing supernatural experiences with God, Luhrmann hypothesized that the practice of prayer could train a person to hear God’s voice—to use one’s mind differently and focus on God’s voice until it became clear. A subsequent experiment conducted between people who were and weren’t practiced in prayer further illuminated her conclusion. For those who have trained themselves to concentrate on their inner experiences, God is experienced in the brain as an actual social relationship: his voice was identified, and that identification was trusted and regarded as real and interactive.
Astute, deeply intelligent, and sensitive, When God Talks Back is a remarkable approach to the intersection of religion, psychology, and science, and the effect it has on the daily practices of the faithful.