Obviously, I am being terribly negligent toward this blog. I’d plead that I have been actively engaged in a host of other activities, but I know in advance that such pleas of Being Busy will be unpersuasive to 1) those who Believe that the Present Blog should be one’s highest priority (a null set) or 2) those who have read the Annual Christmas letter and know that Your Humble Narrator never actually is Busy (a small set) or 3) those who really don’t care one way or the other (vast multitudes). So, I will offer no excuses.
In the previous entry, I discussed the book I read on the way back from California. As every attentive reader of this blog noted, this left open the question of which book I read on the way to California. It was like a Reverse Cliffhanger—what happens Before?
Philip and Carol Zaleski, Prayer: A History
An amazing book. Seriously amazing. First off, the Zaleskis write with a remarkably fluidity and an incredible ear for a great anecdote. For a book which sets out to detail every aspect of prayer, it was an extraordinarily smooth read. Most religious books are either dense academic jargon or insipid feel-good exercises. This is as good as writing about religion gets.
For the most part (the most part being about 90% of the book), the content was fascinating. I’ve been rather devout ever since I can remember, and I have never learned as much about the nature of prayer as I did reading this book on a plane trip from the East to West Coast. This was one of those books which opens up whole new vistas—it is very much akin to cutting down a bunch of trees which were obstructing a magnificent view.
The book is, as the title would suggest, a Grand Tour of Prayer. Reading it, I was struck by how scientific the whole enterprise seemed. Humanities types are not know for offering up scientific evidence, and scientists have great disdain of Proof by Anecdote. But, after seeing the evidence marshaled in this manner, it was striking: prayer exists is so many forms, in so many cultures, over so much time as a real experience of so many people that it would take a bizarre view of the world to say that there is nothing there. Once you see the broad historical scope, there is a remarkable body of evidence that prayer is something fundamental and universal to the human condition. Now why should that be? Perhaps, prayer is actually something real?
Yet, the Zaleskis are also wonderfully quick to note, all prayer is not the same. Buddhists and Christians are not doing the same thing when they pray. Yet both do pray. So, prayer is vastly more complicated than we tend to think. Similarly, the heart of the book is a marvelous taxonomy of prayer: the refugee, the devotee, the ecstatic and the contemplative. I’d never really thought about the types of prayer, but seeing it broken out like this revealed not just the omnipresence of prayer, but the complexity of prayer.
Now the quibble; the only part of the book I thought was weak was two chapters in the last section, discussing prayer and healing and the efficacy of prayer. It’s a foray into social science, and alas, it’s not great social science. There is a big difference between noting that prayer is something real by setting forth a wide array of anecdotal evidence for its existence, and thinking about whether prayer works by looking at a seemingly random small set of studies.
But, don’t let the quibble be anything other than a quibble. This is a marvelous book for anyone who is at all interested in the nature of prayer. And, much to my surprise, while it is clearly an academic book—I can easily imagine a class using this as a text—I have found myself praying vastly more often after reading it. An academic book with practical effect. Who knew such a thing existed?
No comments:
Post a Comment