Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, presents her work on prayer as a set of meta-cognitive practices that have health benefits. This is the first time I can remember getting ideas for magick and mindfulness practices from contemporary American evangelical Christianity.
Dr. Luhrmann briefly discusses some ways of understanding common prayer activities as emotional management techniques:
- The practice of offering gratitude during pain and suffering as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy
- Confessing sins as a way of verbalizing experience to gain a sense of control, and setting small, manageable goals
- Asking for help as “externalizing hope”, in a similar sense as many placebo medical treatments
She then goes into detail about another prayer practice, adoration of God and experience of God as a real presence. Parts of this seem similar to other ways of personifying spontaneous thoughts, and I enjoyed the descriptions of activities people use to learn to talk to God. Luhrmann emphasizes that feeling God as a personal presence requires learning (and even play) as well as constant work, which I found reassuring given how much effort I put into my own (admittedly very different) practices for meeting presences in my mind.
The panel responses at the end are solid as well, but as usual I skipped out after the first “this is more of a comment than a question” from the audience.