Petitionary Prayer Research Articles

Reports of Transpersonal Experiences by NonNative Practitioners of the Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremony: A Critical Appraisal

Background Hibbard (2007) conducted a qualitative interview study of 30 experienced non-native practitioners of the Native American sweat lodge ceremony. The essential purpose of the sweat lodge is to provide a place and context for purification, healing, and petitionary prayer, that is, to draw in and incur spiritual favor (Bucko, 1998). Through purposively identifying and interviewing key practitioners (i.e., sweat lodge leaders and senior practitioners), ten subjects were selected from each of three different lodges, representing different traditions and from different parts of the country, including Montana, Texas, and Arizona. Practitioners included 17 females and 13 males, ranging in age from 27 to 65 with an average of 50. The number of sweat lodge ceremonies participated in ranged from 80 to 1000 with an average of 271, and the years of sweat lodge practice ranged from 8 to 33 with an average of 18. The transcribed interview data revealed 184 reports of transpersonal experiences which occurred during an estimated 8,126 ceremonies. A qualitative data reduction and content analysis identified 31 types of transpersonal experience that were reduced to 17 categories. Major categories include: encounter experiences (e.g., experiencing the presence of or communicating with spirit beings), psychoid experiences (e.g., physical spiritistic phenomena and healings), visual phenomena (e.g., seeing lights and forms in the hot rocks), visions; feelings of connectedness, channeling, intuitive knowings about participants, leaving the physical body, sympathetic resonance with the earth, and feeling beyond/greater than one’s normal self. (For a complete description of the research method and resulting taxonomy of transpersonal sweat lodge experiences, see Hibbard, 2007.)

Prayers for the past

All three of the world's major monotheistic religions traditionally affirm that petitionary prayers can be causally efficacious in bringing about certain states of affairs. Most of these prayers are offered before the state of affairs that they are aimed at helping bring about. In the present paper, I explore the possibility of whether petitionary prayers for the past can also be causally efficacious. Assuming an incompatibilist account of free will, I examine four views in philosophical theology (simple foreknowledge, eternalism, Molinism, and openism) and argue that the first three have the resources to account for the efficacy of past-directed prayers, while the latter does not. I further suggest that on those views which affirm the possible efficacy of past-directed petitionary prayers, such prayers can be ‘impetratory’ even if the agent already knows that the desired state of affairs has obtained.

What Does God Write in His Franklin Planner? The Paradoxes of Providence, Prophecy, and Petitionary Prayer

What Does God Write in His Franklin Planner? The Paradoxes of Providence, Prophecy, and Petitionary Prayer

Contemporary debates in philosophy of religion

Notes to Contributors. Preface. Part I: Attacks on Religious Belief:. 1. Is Evil Evidence against Belief in God?. Evil Is Evidence against Theistic Belief: William L. Rowe (Purdue University). Evil Does Not Make Atheism More Reasonable than Theism: Daniel Howard--Snyder (Western Washington University) and Michael Bergmann (Purdue University). Reply to Howard--Snyder and Bergmann. Reply to Rowe. 2. Does Divine Hiddenness Justify Atheism?. Divine Hiddenness Justifies Atheism: J. L. Schellenberg (Mount Saint Vincent University). Divine Hiddenness Does Not Justify Atheism: Paul K. Moser (Loyola University, Chicago). Reply to Moser. Reply to Schellenberg. 3. Does Science Discredit Religion?. Science Discredits Religion: John Worrall (London School of Economics). The Demise of Religion: Greatly Exaggerated Reports from the Science/Religion Wars: Del Ratzsch (Calvin College). Reply to Ratzsch. Replay to Worrall. Part II: Arguments for Religious Belief:. 4. Is God's Existence the Best Explanation of the Universe?. Explanation and the Cosmological Argument: Bruce R. Reichenbach (Augsburg College). Why Traditional Cosmological Arguments Don't Work, and a Sketch of a New One that Does: Richard Gale (University of Pittsburgh). Reply to Gale. Reply to Reichenbach. 5. Does Religious Experience Justify Religious Belief?. Religious Experience Justifies Religious Belief: William P. Alston (Syracuse University). Do Mystics See God?: Evan Fales (University of Iowa). Reply to Fales. Reply to Alston. 6. Is It Rational for Christians to Believe in the Resurrection?. It Is Rational to Believe in the Resurrection: Stephen T. Davis (Claremont McKenna College). It Is Not Rational to Believer in the Resurrection: Michael Martin (Boston University). Reply to Martin. Reply to Davis. Part III: Issues within Religion:. 7. Can Only One Religion Be True?. How to Sink in Cognitive Quicksand: Nuancing Religious Pluralism: Keith E. Yandell (University of Wisconsin). It Is Not Reasonable to Believer that Only One Religion is True: Peter Byrne (King's College, University of London). Reply to Byrne. Reply to Yandell. 8. Does God Take Risks in Governing the World?. God Takes Risks: William Hasker (Huntington College). God Does Not Take Risks: Paul Helm (Regent College). Reply to Helm. Reply to Hasker. 9. Does God Respond to Petitionary Prayer?. God Responds to Prayer: Michael J. Murray (Franklin and Marshall College). God Does Not Necessarily Respond to Prayer: David Basinger (Roberts Wesleyan College). Reply to Basinger. Reply to Murray. 10. Is Eternal Damnation Compatible with the Christian Concept of God?. Eternal Hell and the Christian Concept of God: Jerry Walls (Asbury Theological Seminary). No Hell: Thomas Talbott (Willamette University). Reply to Talbott. Reply to Walls. 11. Is Morality Based on God's Commands?. Divine Commands Are the Foundation of Morality: Janine Marie Idziak (Loras College). Ethics Is Based on Natural Law: Craig A. Boyd (Greenville College) and Raymond J. VanArragon (Asbury College). Reply to Boyd and VanArragon. Reply to Idziak. 12. Should a Christian Be a Mind--Body Dualist?. Christians Should Affirm Mind--Body Dualism: Dean W. Zimmerman (Rutgers University). Christians Should Reject Mind--Body Dualism: Lynne Rudder Baker (University of Massachusetts). Reply to Baker. Reply to Zimmerman. Index

Is free-will theism religiously inadequate? A reply to Ciocchi

David Ciocchi has charged that ‘open’ or free-will theism is religiously inadequate. This is it is because it is unable to affirm the ‘presumption of divine intervention in response to petitionary prayer’ (PDI), a presumption Ciocchi claims is implicit in the religious practice of ordinary Christian believers. I argue that PDI and Ciocchi's other assumptions concerning prayer are too strong, and would upon reflection be rejected by most believers. On the other hand, God as conceived by free-will theism has extensive resources for answering petitionary prayers, including prayers whose fulfilment depends on the free responses of other persons.

Prayer as Interpersonal Coping in the Lives of Mothers with HIV

The spirituality of 22 mothers diagnosed with HIV was explored through face-to-face interviews and revealed that 95% of the mothers pray. Active prayers (e.g., talking to God by adoring, thanking, confessing, and supplicating) were more frequently reported than receptive prayers (e.g., quietly listening to God, being open, surrendering). Supplicatory or petitionary prayers for help and health were the most frequent type of prayer, and adoration was the least frequent. The majority of mothers in the sample perceived prayer as a positive coping mechanism associated with outcomes such as: support, positive attitude/affect, and peace. Overall, results supported expanding the boundary conditions of the interpersonal coping component of the Social Interaction Model (Derlega & Barbee, 1998) to include the spiritual dimension of prayer.

The religious adequacy of free-will theism

In this paper I question the claim that the increasingly popular position known as ‘free-will theism’ or ‘the open view of God’ supports a rich religious life. To do this I advance a notion of ‘religious adequacy’, and then argue that free-will theism fails to be religiously adequate with respect to one of the principal practices of the religious life – petitionary prayer. Drawing on current work in libertarian free-will theory, I consider what are likely the only two lines of defence free-will theists might use in response to my argument. I argue that these defences either fail or have features that make them unacceptable to free-will theists. I then suggest that this failure with petitionary prayer is an instance of a larger problem for free-will theism, that the position's distinctive views often differ more dramatically from the common beliefs and practices of most believers than is usually recognized or acknowledged. I conclude that free-will theism can support a rich religious life only for those who make the requisite changes in belief and practice, including changing their expectations about petitionary prayer.

How Ordinary Cognition Informs Petitionary Prayer

AbstractFour studies (two experiments, a journaling study, and a questionnaire) conducted with American Protestant college students explored intuitions concerning petitionary prayer. Since Protestant theology offers little teaching on through which modes of causation God is most likely to act, it was hypothesized that intuitive causal cognition would be used to generate inferences regarding this aspect of petitionary prayer. Participants in these studies favored asking God to act via psychological causation over the biological and mechanistic domains. Further, in fictitious scenarios participants reported being more likely to ask a supercomputer or Superman to solve a problem through mechanistic intervention than God. These results are consistent with two previous findings: that God is often intuitively represented as having a single physical location (and it is not nearby); and psychosocial agents (such as God) are expected to require physical contact to act on non-agents.

The Correspondence Between Attachment Dimensions and Prayer in College Students

Attachment theory applied to religious behavior suggests that at a given point in time, "avoidant" individuals (who experience discomfort with closeness) engage in less prayer overall, and less prayer during times of stress than nonavoidant individuals. Additionally, "anxious" individuals (who worry about abandonment) would be expected to engage in more help-seeking prayer than nonanxious individuals. To test these hypotheses in a college sample, the frequency of three types of prayer were individually regressed on avoidance, anxiety, anxiety × avoidance, stress, stress × avoidance, stress × anxiety, in addition to the control variables of age, church attendance during childhood and adolescence, gender, gender × avoidance, and gender × anxiety. The hypotheses were supported in so far as: (a) avoidance was significantly and negatively related to colloquial (conversational) and meditative (contemplative) prayer, (b) stress × avoidance showed the predicted relation to colloquial and meditative prayer, and (c) anxiety was a significant predictor of petitionary (materialistic help-seeking) prayer, only.

Referring to God: Jewish and Christian philosophical and theological perspectives

The source and destination of thought, John Haldane the particularity of God as disclosed in experience, Jerry Gellman Alston on referring to God, Joe Houston do Jews and Christians worship the same god?, Baruch Brody the god of Abraham, Saadia and Aquinas, Eleonore Stump Maimonides and Calvin on divine accommodation, Paul Helm petitionary prayer, Jerry Gellman.

The Structure and Variety of Prayer

Although in Europe as a whole and in the Netherlands in particular, church membership is in steady decline, most Dutch youth still pray. In this study, praying is interpreted as a ritual, composed of seven structural elements: need, action, effect, direction, time, place and method. On theoretical grounds, we distinguish four varieties of prayer. In our sample, petitionary prayer and religious prayer were found to coincide. In both, direction (mostly towards God) is central and so they are labeled as religious prayer. In meditative prayer the focus is on action (meditating or pondering). In psychological prayer need (concrete problems, especially the death of loved ones) is central. The importance of time and place was greater than expected. Every type of praying has a specific set of adjuncts. Psychological prayer is mostly said at night, lying in bed. Religious prayer takes place at fixed moments in church. Meditative prayer is performed anywhere and anytime. Young people who pray always combine these three types of prayer, with the core of praying being psychological in nature and functioning as a self-directing style of problem-solving. For most young people, praying is a way of coping cognitively and actively with problems of daily life and unresolvable negative events in order to gain secondary control and maintain balance in their life.

Toward a Process Philosophy of Petitionary Prayer

Toward a Process Philosophy of Petitionary Prayer

Petitionary Prayer to an Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent God

Petitionary Prayer to an Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent God

Spiritual conflicts associated with praying about cancer.

A secondary analysis of data from a study designed to describe how persons use prayer to cope with cancer is presented in this paper to illuminate the spiritual conflicts that can be experienced among persons with cancer. Employing phenomenological methods, 30 persons from various phases of the cancer experience and religious backgrounds, were interviewed in depth about why, when, and how they prayed, as well as what they prayed about and the outcomes they expected. The secondary analysis revealed that many of these informants had hesitancies about petitionary prayers for particular things, a cure, or for themselves. They also indicated questions about theodicy and the meaning of having cancer, the nature of God, and acknowledged 'unanswered' prayer. Several described an inner conflict about releasing control to God. A few referred to bargaining with God, and a few doubted their personal spirituality and worth, if they were praying correctly, and if prayer was efficacious.

Can a Scientist Pray?

John Polkinghorne Can a Scientist Pray? Can a scientist pray? I suppose it depends a bit on what you mean by"pray."We know there are lots ofdifferent ways ofpraying. There is adoration. There is meditation. There is contrition. There is petition. I think actually quite a lot of scientists pray widiout even knowing that they're doing so. One ofthe fundamental experiences in science—in fact, one of the rewards for doing science—is the feeling ofwonder diat we have from time to time at die marvelous pattern and structure and fruitful history ofthe physical world that is revealed through our inquiry. Wonder is an indispensable word in the scientist's vocabulary and it is the payofffor all the weary labor and frustration involved in scientific research. I was a dieoretical physicist, a sort of pencil and paper person, and at the end of an average working day my wastepaper basket had lots of crumbled bits of paper in it, as the good ideas of the morning failed to work out in the afternoon. As with This lecture was delivered by John Polkinghorne at the University of St.Thomas, October 2, 1997. LOGOS 2:2 SPRING 1999 LOGOS every worthwhile activity, there is a lot ofroutine involved and a certain degree offrustration, but the reward is tiiis sense ofwonder. And when scientists feel that sense ofwonder at die rational beauty ofdie physical world, whether they know it or not, I think they are actually adoring the Creator, whose mind is revealed to us in that marvelous order. I believe that the beautiful equations of fundamental physics express the mind of the Creator, set forth in the laws of nature which, in their regularity, are expressions of God's faithfulness . So diat form ofpraying adoration or wonder is very natural to a scientist. But ofcourse, where the rub comes, where the question, "Can a Scientist Pray?" gets radier pointed, and where we need to think carefully is in relation to petitionary prayer. Can a scientist actually withintegrity, knowing all that he or she does know as a scientist, ask God to do something in the physical world?After all, doesn't science tell us that the physical world is very orderly, and regular, that what is going to happen, is going to happen? Doesn't that mean that really there isn't scope for God's special providential action over and above the laws ofnature that God has ordained? I think that's a problem many people feel. Let me illustrate it by referring to ourAnglican formularies.The historic Book ofCommon Prayer, which reached its final form in 1662, contains within it a prayer for seasonable weather, asking that God will send good weadier for the crops. When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1928, a somewhat modified but still recognizable form of diat prayer was retained in the prayer book. When, however, theAlternative Service Book (which is the modern liturgy diat is used in most Church of England churches, not in all as we don't abolish old liturgies when we introduce new ones)was issued and audiorized in 1 980, no such prayer appeared in die book. The nearest you can get to it is a harvest collect retrospectively thanking God for the fruits of the earth. CAN A SCIENTIST PRAY?I ? But it's not entirely clear why one should be thankful afterwards for what one did not have die nerve to ask for beforehand! I diink that many church congregations would feel uneasy were the priest to lead them in prayers for a change in the weather, say during a period ofdrought or a period offlood, because it seems to diem diat the weather just happens. That of course would certainly be so if the physical world were a clockwork world. The scientific discoveries ofdie eighteendi and nineteenth centuries, stemming from the great ideas of Sir Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, seemed to present a picture of a world that was mechanical in its nature. The world was portrayed as a system that is predictable and controllable; in a sense it is tame—we can know what it's going to do. For...

The Devil's Dilemma in Flaubert' Saint Antony

In La Téntation de Saint Antoine Gustave Flaubert dramatizes a philosophical exchange about the nature of divine providence and the efficacy of petitionary prayer. The Devil and Antony consider the question of whether God can be called upon for relief from suffering. The Saint assumes as popular religion teaches that it is possible to ask for God's help in emergency situations, while the Devil poses a dilemma to challenge Antony's faith. The Devil seeks to expose contradictions in some of the beliefs Antony holds about God's infinite perfection. The Devil's argument purports to prove that God is not a person, and that for this reason God is inaccessible to human interaction. The Devil's dilemma is supposed to be this:(1) If God as an infinitely perfect being created the universe, then divine providence is not needed [does not exist].(2) If divine providence is needed [exists], then the universe is defective [not the creation of God as an infinitely perfect being].Although these look at first to be the opposite poles of an excluded middle, propositions (1) and (2) are mere contrapositives. Since the Devil's propositions (1) and (2) are logically equivalent, the Devil can only proceed to the conclusion that God does not exist or that divine providence is not needed or does not exist paradoxically by assuming that God exists or that divine providence is needed or exists. Yet if divine providence is needed or exists, then God exists as its divine source. If the Devil is supposed to succeed by logic, his dilemma as Flaubert portrays it is powerless to prove that the only reasonable religious attitude is an impassionate metaphysical acknowledgement of the existence of an impersonal infinitely perfect Substance, which is absolute unchanging unmoveable Being.

Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination by Robert Bruce Mullin

BOOK REVIEWS309 founding spirit. It provides a key resource for those who wish to focus on the Vincentian FamUy Tree Ui the forest of God's faithful foUowers. Miriam D. Ukeritis, CSJ. Sisters ofSt.Joseph ofCarondelet, Albany (New York) Province Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination. By Robert Bruce MuLUn. (New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 322. $30.00.) Robert Bruce Mullin has crafted a very smart study of the idea of miracles in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his book, in fact, should contribute in important ways to reshaping the scholarly conversation about the theological fault Lines that defined GUded Age religion. On one level, MulUn's study is about the coUapse of the revered Protestant idea of a "limited age of miracles." For 300 years, English-speaking Protestants had agreed that miracles—direct divine intervention in the course of nature and history in response to personal, petitionary prayer—had been limited to the apostolic church, and were granted then for only two reasons: to highUght bibUcal revelation and to aid in the establishment of Christianity. This idea had achieved something close to doctrinal status in the centuries after the Reformation in the Anglo-American world because it performed three essential functions : it helped to define the crucial dividing line between sober, Bible-beUeving Protestants and the magical, pagan world of CathoUcs; it anchored the unique authority of the New Testament in "mighty acts" different from aU subsequent, post-apostolic "wonders"; and—especially after the rise of the"New Science"— it aUowed Protestants to combine a belief in the biblical miracles ofJesus with the Enlightenment vision of regular, orderly "Nature." By the mid-nineteenth century, this pan-Protestant belief was under attack from a number of positions: from Protestant exponents of higher criticism like Charles Briggs; from agnostic practitioners of evolutionary science like Aldous Huxley; from Christian advocates of faith healing like John Alexander Dowie; and from "romantic" religious thinkers like Horace Bushnell. MuULn argues that by the final period of his study (1850-1930) the belief in the "limited age" had lost it hegemonic role in defining the beUefs of Protestants, and was limited to outposts of the older orthodoxy like Princeton Seminary. But MuUin's story is a nuanced and sophisticated tale eschewing the heavyhanded traditional interpretation pressed by some inteUectuaI historians—that the assault on the miraculous was part of an inevitable evolution of naturaUstic principles of "modern science" after Darwin. MuLUn convincingly shows that the GUded Age debate over the miraculous witnessed the rise of a large and vocal countervaUing movement within the North Atlantic Protestant community that saw miracles as increasingly important in the modern world, and wit- 310BOOK REVIEWS nessed as weU a dramatic reaUgnment of debate partners in the discussion, as many devout Protestants found more succor from Catholics than from feUow Protestants in the culture-wide fracas. MuUin demonstrates that by 1915 the belief in the "limited age" was simply no longer accepted by many Englishspeaking beUevers, and that an emergent interest in the "ministry of healing" had led to three distinctive positions on the miraculous that stiU define, to a large extent, contemporary religious discourse about the miraculous: a "therapeutic " model of miracles, that sees the divine working in natural categories; a "sacramental/Uturgical" model, that emphasizes the role of grace operating through formaUy ordained ecclesiastical channels; and a "thaumaturgical" model, that argues that God intervenes directly in the Uves of the faithful. This is an extremely important and well-written study, and contributes in three significant ways to reshaping the discussion of religion in the North Atlantic world in the GUded Age: first, Mullin demonstrates that debates focused on the miraculous may very weU be at least as important as the discussions about the authority and inspiration of scripture in understanding the splintering and realignment of the Protestant mainstream in the hatf-century after 1875; secondly, MuUin shows that this debate appears to have replaced the traditional Catholic-Protestant division in defining the "parties" of theological discussion by the early years of the twentieth century, and thus posits an "ecumenical " sentiment across Reformation Lines earUer than usually recognized by religious historians...

In Defense of Petitionary Prayer

In Defense of Petitionary Prayer

Petitionary Prayer: a Response to Murray and Meyers

In a recent article in this journal, Michael Murray and Kurt Meyers offer us (among other things) two innovative and thought-provoking responses to the important question of why God would, even occasionally, refrain from giving us that which he can and would like to give us until we request that he do so: to help the believer learn more about God and thus become more like him and to help the believer realize she is dependent on God. I argue that neither explanation is adequate and thus that more work on this significant topic remains to be done.

Adolescents’ attitudes to prayer

Contemporary attitudes to prayerand prayer habits are explored among 900 adolescents attending non‐denominational secondary schools in Dundee, Scotland. The results reveal that a high proportion of the sample never pray. This paper looks at some possible explanations for this, including the difficulties found with petitionary prayer. It examines the impact of sex, age and church attendance on the responses of the pupils.