There are many ways to pray. But three weeks into the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, I can say this: The Ignatian Way, for me, is like filling up with high-octane gas. They had me at Day 1, ...

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” Romans 8:26 As we draw closer to ...

Buried deep in the Norton Anthology, George Herbert’s little poem with the unpretentious title “Prayer” is easy to miss. Decorously contained on a half-page with regular rhyme and punctuation, it ...

When I was younger, a nun told me that if I only prayed when I was in trouble, then I was indeed in trouble. That maxim was filed away and revived when I began reading Learning to Pray: A Guide for ...

The tradition of writing prayer guides reaches back to the early centuries of the church, to Origen and Evagrius and to the many treatises on the Lord’s Prayer by church fathers. The tradition has ...

Five years ago, Toni Morrison, the late Nobel laureate and prodigious novelist, wrote a short article for The Nation magazine on the occasion of the publication's 150th anniversary. The piece, titled ...

Volumes have been written about prayer and praying, but I didn’t learn to pray by reading what others have written about prayer. My parents taught me to “talk to God” before I learned to read. Even ...

Francis began a cycle of catechesis dedicated to the "Our Father", highlighting how Jesus was "a man of prayer". "Even if we have been praying for so many years, we must always learn!". "And we do not ...

Imagine you love the sport of tennis. You watch every match you can on TV. You subscribe to Tennis magazine. You buy instructional videos and read biographies of famous players. Then one day you pick ...

I have always prayed at night. I always felt like God could hear me the best just before bed, in the stillness before falling asleep. When I was younger it was formulaic prayers (as many as possible, ...