Prayer

It could be a perfunctory ritual, passed down through generations; a mechanically recited poem. But equally, the mealtime prayer can be a genuine spiritual exercise.

The way we pray in public reveals what our secret prayers are truly like. Beyond mere words, it is our attitude and motivation that give meaning and substance to prayer.

“I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite" (Isaiah 57:15).

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

This coronavirus crisis has, for me, some perplexing parallels with a well-known incident narrated in the Gospel of Matthew (14:22-33). The disciples are confined in a little boat in the middle of a terrible storm, almost as we are confined at home today by the emergency laws of our countries.

God reveals Himself through the Bible, the person of Jesus Christ, nature, and our conscience. Prayer is not revelatory. If it is neither revelatory for humans nor for God, what is prayer then?

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

Many times we don’t have the patience to wait for an answer to our prayers, and other times we don’t even know when we've received it. For the ten Boom family, the answer to some prayers came 100 years later.

A major crisis pushes us to re-evaluate the way we see and do things in the fields of health, finance, and social interaction. But how does this crisis affect our religious practices—especially the most common of these, prayer?

The realm of tears is so mysterious! - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I was descending from Omu Peak, in the Bucegi Mountains, with a few dozen young people. It had not been an ideal hike, and we were behind schedule. The forest made the darkness even thicker as it began to cover the mountain, and slowly, our minds as well.

As a book editor who works in a Christian publishing house, I know prayer works from a sales perspective. Books on the topic of prayer are consistently among our best sellers. It seems that many of our customers and readers—mostly people of faith, but including people who are interested but uncertain about faith—are keen to be reassured that prayer works and to find...

"Suppose I go to the Israelites…and they ask me, ‘What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, 'I AM who I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you'" (Exodus 3:13-14).

One day, Jesus’s disciples—who followed Him about, observing His every word and action—asked Him to teach them how to pray.