On this beautiful late summer Friday (at least where I’m writing from ☺), I want to try to bring together two of my great interests: prayer, which I don’t understand but practice anyway; and video, which I think is an incredibly powerful medium for conveying the faith in an experiential, and not just cognitive, way. To do that – or at least to give a taste of doing that – I’m going to turn to a project exercised by a group of artists I greatly admire called The Work of the People. They’ve created a rather simple video based on the powerful prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. I’ll print the words below; they also...

I’ve wanted for a while to write an occasional series of posts on prayer. Why? Because, frankly, I don’t understand prayer. I know I’m supposed to do it. And I do. But that doesn’t mean I understand it. I don’t understand, for instance, how it works. I’m not always sure what I’m supposed to do, either. And I definitely can’t quite figure out the part about “answered” prayer. Maybe you’ve felt that way, too. Maybe there’s a lot about prayer that you don’t understand, but you still do it. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe prayer is too big to simply understand, too important for us to be able to define simply or once and...