Prayer: A Guide for the Perplexed
Overview
At the heart of Christian life and liturgy is the practice of prayer, that distinctive and yet utterly perplexing act, which believers and non-believers alike struggle to understand. Drawing on the rich resources of the Christian tradition of prayer and spirituality (including Origen, Augustine, the Reformers, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Merton), liturgical resources, and biblical material, this book guides the reader through some of the fundamental questions, tricky issues, and complex themes surrounding the problem of prayer from a Christian perspective. Additionally, Cocksworth describes and investigates the recent re-turns to theologies of prayer and spirituality in contemporary academic theology and ethics (including, amongst others, in the work of Rowan Williams, Sarah Coakley, Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells) and provides some reflections on why prayer has suddenly once again become quite fashionable in academic discourse. Finally, Cocksworth examines some of the problems in various popular approaches to prayer that market prayer in terms of individual therapy or are dominated by issues of efficacy and the promise to pray better.
Top Highlights
“Following the logic of the ‘Prayer of Preparation’, in prayer the idols of the heart are” (Page 72)
“61. If you are a theologian, you will pray truly, and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian.” (Page 22)
“Knowledge of God is never an external knowledge but is experienced through the inner work of prayer by which the pray-er is caught up in God’s own knowledge of God’s self.” (Page 23)
“In equal measure, prayer is strikingly ordinary and vastly complicated” (Page 7)
“Christian formation has become largely an ‘intellectual project’ preoccupied with the acquisition of information that reduces human beings to little more that ‘brains on sticks’” (Pages 194–195)
- Title: Prayer: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Author: Ashley Cocksworth
- Series: Guides for the Perplexed
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Print Publication Date: 2018
- Logos Release Date: 2019
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Christian spirituality & religious experience; Religion › Spirituality; Religion › Christian theology--Systematic; Christian theology
- ISBNs: 9780567198723, 9780567226679, 9780567682222, 9780567682215, 0567198723, 0567226670, 0567682226, 0567682218
- Resource ID: LLS:PRAYERGDPRPLXD
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T02:19:47Z