My buddy Charles has written an excellent piece on prayer over at his site, Liminality. His conclusions about the nature and significance of prayer overlap a great deal with my father's views on the subject.
I, personally, am not a particularly prayerful or churchy person; prayer isn't a large part of my life, especially since I stopped being a classical theist all those years ago, but I respect the sort of prayer that Charles is talking about, which is consonant with John Hick's basic insight into good religion, i.e., that it is a turn away from self-centeredness toward Reality-centeredness.
Give Charles a read, and though it's not really my place to say this, feel free to leave him some comments.
_
Marathon
12 years ago
5 comments:
I figured most of it would come as no great surprise to you, seeing as how it does indeed overlap with your father's views, but I bet there are a lot of Christians who would be surprised by my conclusions. One of my former students noted how those conclusions clashed with certain tenets of Korean Christianity, in particular the "philosophy of praying for blessings" (기복사상). I think this philosophy is universal, but it does seem to be particularly prevalent here.
At any rate, I do indeed welcome comments, so you were by no means out of place to say that. Thanks for reading, and sorry for the wait!
I can't find a place to leave comments on his site.
John from Daejeon
Nevermind, there is a link for comments now.
I'll leave a comment based on a pretty big prayer problem in South Texas and Mexico...Brujeria.
http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=24968
"Catholic Church wages campaign against witchcraft in Mexican town"
John from Daejeon
John,
There are actually three links to leave comments on that page--two "contact" links in the menus at the top and bottom and the "send me your thoughts" at the end of the entry.
These comments are sent to me directly via email--I don't have public comments.
Interesting story, by the way.
Charles (Sorry for sucking up some of your space, Kevin),
I'd like to leave a decent, well thought out comment, so it may take me a while before I send one off to you.
I'm also a bit busy right now. It's getting down to the wire with entries into that "Best job in the World" contest down under. I doubt I have the looks for it, but I'm using it in my upper level middle school classes. I will submit the best video to the contest that my students can come up with. Sadly, many think I am a Korean pop star and are having trouble doing rewrites when they find out I can't sing. At least they are learning a bit about Australia in the process.
http://www.islandreefjob.com/en/#/apply-now
Hey, Kevin, if you got this job, you could afford to walk across both the U.S. and Australia several times. The cut-off date is the 22nd.
John from Daejeon
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