More About Prayer Books

Not long ago, and I’m sure you remember it as if it were yesterday, I wrote about my search for the perfect prayer book. Help Help Help, &c. Well, God and reader Ed P. have heard my cry. Ed P. writes: . . . I commend to your consideration the “Monastic Diurnal” published by . . . . Continue Reading »

On Prayer and Prayer Books

Anne Lamott wrote once that prayer boils down to saying either Help Help Help or Thank you Thank you Thank you. The description’s accurate enough, as I have some reason to know, and as a default mode for prayer, I guess a person could do worse. To believe in God to begin with, and to believe . . . . Continue Reading »

How to Pray

As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era. Continue Reading »