The Phenomenology of Prayer

Title page

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pp. v-

Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Introduction

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pp. 1-9

How could there be a vibrant religious life without the practice of prayer? In both theistic and nontheistic traditions, religious followers are generally counseled to steadfast prayer—to pray ‘‘without ceasing.’’ Without prayer, religious sensibility would likely atrophy and...

PART I: Learning How to Pray

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pp. 10-

Chapter 1: Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self

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pp. 13-31

Our neighbors were visiting a cathedral in Italy with their three-year- old son. He saw a woman kneeling in one of the pews and asked what she was doing. ‘‘She’s praying,’’ he was told. ‘‘She’s asking God for things.’’ A few minutes later his parents found him kneeling in...

Chapter 2: Who Prays?

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pp. 32-49

I begin by remarking the way in which the word prayer comes up in Levinas’s philosophical writings, especially its insistent connection with ethical language. Recall Totality and Infinity’s description that language, along with...

Chapter 3: Becoming What We Pray

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pp. 50-62

Toward the end of his reflective philosophical journal The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee recalls a searing moment in the mid-Pacific during World War II when he served as captain of a minesweeper.² He recalls bringing down kamikaze pilots close enough that he and...

Chapter 4: Prayer as Kenosis

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pp. 63-72

Prayer, both private and public, is one of the most common of human activities. All human history records it; its roots probably go back to before recorded history. Yet when we attempt to submit its most common form, that of petition, to philosophical analysis, we run into...

Chapter 5: The Prayers and Tears of Friedrich Nietzsche

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pp. 73-87

From Nietzsche’s first work to his last, one finds the intonation of prayer and the stain of tears.¹ The child who weeps over the deaths of father and brother becomes the man who sobs peering into the abyss of the tragic or encountering a horse being abused. The child...

Chapter 6: Attention and Responsibility

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pp. 88-100

According to Aristotle (in On Interpretation, 17 A 4–5), prayer is a logos or speech that is not susceptible to truth or falsity. Unlike declarative propositions that assume a possible correspondence between our words and the affairs of the world—a correspondence that...

PART II: Praying and the Limits of Phenomenology

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pp. 101-

Chapter 7: Irigaray’s Between East and West

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pp. 103-118

In Between East and West, her recent reflections on the encounter between her yoga practice and her work in Western philosophy, Luce Irigaray notes that breathing and speaking are, for most people, inverse operations, using the body, the diaphragm, and the lungs in...

Chapter 8: Heidegger and the Prospect of a Phenomenology of Prayer

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pp. 119-133

An attempt to contribute to a ‘‘phenomenology of prayer’’ ought to begin with the recognition that the word ‘‘phenomenology’’ means many different things to many different people. Moreover, it must be recognized that none of these usages has any obvious claim to being...

Chapter 9: Edith Stein

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pp. 134-141

In her autobiography, Edith Stein tells us that at the age of fifteen she ‘‘deliberately and consciously’’ gave up praying.¹ Perhaps the most significant experience between this decision and her return to the practice of prayer with her conversion to Catholicism at the age...

Chapter 10: ‘‘Too Deep for Words’’

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pp. 142-153

Those who interpret deconstruction as another species of nihilism believe that Jacques Derrida preys—specifically, that he preys upon texts like some hermeneutical savage, some rough beast slouching toward the arid desert of relativism, dragging behind him the Holy...

Chapter 11: Plus de Secret

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pp. 154-167

St. Augustine begins his Confessions with a prayer, a prayer that questions how and why we pray: ‘‘How shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord?’’¹ Much has been said about the epistemological issues raised by prayer, which questions what can be known of God, and...

Chapter 12: Praise—Pure and Personal?

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pp. 168-181

In ‘‘Education and Prayer,’’ Emmanuel Levinas complains that our prayer has too often become a purely isolated and individuated experience and that we have lost the social and collective dimension of prayer.¹ Prayer, he suggests, always has a liturgical and communal...

PART III: Defining Prayer’s Intentionality

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pp. 183-

Chapter 13: The Saving or Sanitizing of Prayer

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pp. 185-194

In his book, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo proposes the following hypothesis: What if theology were to confess itself no longer able to save the name of God? What if, beyond the economy of sacrifice, it...

Chapter 14: How (Not) to Find God in All Things

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pp. 195-208

What is meant by the phenomenology of prayer? Following Levinas, I shall argue in this paper that prayer, like ethics, ‘‘reverses’’ Husserl’s model of intentionality. Prayer disprivileges the role of cognition in every act of genuine transcendence. On account of this radical...

Chapter 15: Prayer and Incarnation

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pp. 209-216

In the opening chapters of Confessions, the question Augustine broaches before all others is whether we must first beg for help from God to know who God is, or must first know who God is in order to beg for help. Is prayer, then, essentially ‘‘begging,’’ and is ‘‘begging’’...

Chapter 16: The Infinite Supplicant

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pp. 217-231

As if prayer (precari) were not in a precarious (precarius) enough position, teetering at the limit between myself and the Other, prayer also has two further difficulties. The first of these two additional difficulties is that prayer is often alleged to be uttered,...

Chapter 17: Proslogion

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pp. 232-243

I was reading St. Anselm: Up now, slight man! Flee, for a little while, thy occupations; hide thyself, for a time, from thy disturbing thoughts. Cast aside, now, thy burdensome cares, and put away thy toilsome business. Yield room for some little time to God; and rest for a...

Notes

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pp. 245-291

Contributors

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pp. 293-294

Index

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pp. 295-298

Other Books in Fordham's Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series

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pp. 299-301