Prayer

Faith-Marie Zamblé 11-13-2018

"Prayer" at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Faith Zamblé.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, James Webb has fit the sound of Chicago’s religious devotion into one room. The city’s religious life spouts from speakers fixed to the floor. Museumgoers shuffle across the expanse of red carpet, pausing over one mushroom shaped speaker and then another — like bees gathering pollen, intent on producing cultural understanding and greater empathy.

I HAD HONED MY SKILLS as a leader in the backfield, first in the black power struggle and later as executive director of the influential body of African American congressional leaders that made up the Congressional Black Caucus. I also worked quietly as a bridge builder between leaders of diverse backgrounds.

But after my husband Tom Skinner’s passing, I was voted by the board of directors to become president of the Skinner Leadership Institute. As the number two person in the organization, I had relied more on external skills of leadership like executing the vision, establishing goals, strategic planning, and creating, as well as managing the budget.

Parker Palmer 7-02-2018

Fortified with fruitcake, I went in search of some way to live as a contemplative amid the world’s madness. Over the next few years, I read about the mystical stream that runs through all of the world’s wisdom traditions, and experimented with several popular contemplative practices. But, with the exception of the Quaker meeting for worship, I couldn’t find a practice compatible with my temperament, religious inclinations, and life situation.

Patton Dodd 6-25-2018

Photo by Josh Boot on Unsplash.

I do not know how to measure the efficacy of prayer. And I know that prayer is not all that’s needed to respond to the concerns of the day. But I also know that my response to the moment we’re living in will be more substantial, more focused and certain, if I tune out the distracting din and choose to attend to the world in prayer instead. 

Image via Flickr

As far back as the early 19th century, Catholic students and other religious groups were sometimes whipped, beaten, and worse, for not participating in prayer and Bible reading in the common schools, a predecessor to the public schools.

RNS Staff 3-20-2018

Image via Google Maps / RNS

Courts have generally rejected challenges to “See You at the Pole” events, in which students who want to pray gather at their school’s flagpole outside of class time. And the Supreme Court has generally upheld student-led prayer as long as it is not compulsory or organized by school officials.

Students attend a prayer vigil for students killed and injured after a 15-year-old boy opened fire with a handgun at MarshallCounty High School, at Life in Christ Church in Marion, Kentucky, U.S., January 23, 2018. REUTERS/Harrison McClary

How does this happen in our hometown? We read about it and see it all too frequently on the news in other parts of the nation. But not here, not in our home. What are we to do with a tragedy of this magnitude in our community?

Image via Nadin Panina / Shutterstock

Kevin L. Ladd, a professor of psychology at Indiana University South Bend, said it makes sense that, as society grows less religious in the traditional sense, fewer people are turning to prayer.

When nations turn toward trouble
and hope seems all but gone,
when threats and conflicts double,
what can we count upon?

Kaitlin Curtice 11-21-2017

Sometimes we don’t know what to pray,
or how to talk to you about fixing what’s broken.
We pray in generalities, that you’ll
“be with us, guide us, restore us”
but sometimes, that’s not the tangible need
we really want to name.

Kimberly Winston 10-09-2017

Image via RNS/Kimberly Winston

“We always know we need God,” he said, walking back and forth by an elevated slender podium, a microphone headset catching his every word. “But if there ever was a week when we really know we need God, this has been that week.”

Seven days ago — though most people here said it felt much longer — Stephen Paddock shot hundreds of people from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel before shooting himself. Fifty-eight people were killed — most of them tourists — and almost 500 were wounded.

Image via Shutterstock.com/Parilov

We pray for others far away

Who’ve seen destruction, too;

We look beyond ourselves, for they

Are also loved by you.

Kaitlin Curtice 8-28-2017

People are rescued from flood waters from Hurricane Harvey on an air boat in Dickinson, Texas August 27, 2017. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
 

Jesus, when you walked on the water,

you beckoned Peter to come out of the boat, unafraid.

President Trump, flanked by evangelical leaders Paula White, right, and Jack Graham, in blue suit, speaks during the National Day of Prayer on May 4, 2017. Photo courtesy of Reuters/Carlos Barria

Squeezed among two dozen other evangelical supporters of the president, Southern Baptist Richard Land added his hand to the others reaching to pray for President Trump. The July 10 Oval Office prayer session, which has been panned and praised, is just one example of the access Trump and his key aides have given to conservative Christian leaders — from an hourslong May dinner in the Blue Room to an all-day meeting earlier this month in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.

Image via RNS/REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

A week after a terrorist bomb killed more than 20 and left scores injured, the people of Manchester will make their way through the streets of their grief-stricken city in one of its most traditional and religious events: the Whit Walk.

This will be a moment where the old Manchester meets the new, when the Christian tradition of the walk, commemorating the Feast of Whitsun — or Holy Trinity — meets the secular rituals that have come to define public mourning since this increasingly irreligious nation said goodbye to Princess Diana, who died exactly 20 years ago.

Jim Wallis 5-18-2017

Every day now, politicians and the pundits debate what obstruction of justice technically means, and ask how resilient our political institutions are to a presidency that almost daily goes beyond “unprecedented.” But while we all wait for the next crisis to hit and anticipate the new media cycle about it, we dare not miss what people are faith are always supposed to be most concentrated on — the poor and the vulnerable who are facing unprecedented threats from funding and policy decisions that lie just ahead.

Charles L. Howard 2-24-2017

We do not believe the same thing. We are Abrahamic siblings, yes, and deeply connected in important ways, but our faiths, theology, practice, histories, views on God are different. 

But love.

Photo via Reurters/ Michal Fattal 

If the High Court ultimately rules that women can read Torah in the women’s section of the Western Wall, ultra-Orthodox lawmakers in the Israeli Parliament may try to pass legislation to criminalize the practice, not only at the traditional wall but also at Robinson’s Arch. 

“A New Father, Awe-Struck” is a new hymn-prayer written days before Christmas 2016. It begins with a traditional image of a manger scene, and becomes a prayer that we may look deeper— at our loving God who chose to come into this world as someone who was poor, powerless, in danger, and a refugee.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Ronen Zvulun

Hoping for divine intervention – or Jewish votes – Donald Trump wrote a short prayer to be inserted in between the stones of the Western Wall.

Trump’s team photographed and sent a copy of the handwritten prayer to Ynet News and Yedioth Ahronoth, Israeli sister publications. The original was handed to David Faiman, a Trump advisor, who was heading to Israel, the news outlets reported.