Prayer is often treated as either private devotion or public ritual. This book takes a third route: it treats prayer as a precision craft for directing attention, emotion, and meaning, then tests what that craft can and cannot do. Drawing on cognitive psychology, contemplative neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and careful readings of frontier research, it separates sturdy mechanisms from grand claims. You will find clear explanations of placebo and expectancy effects, group synchrony and social support, neuroplasticity and habit formation, alongside a sober tour of contested topics such as quantum language and micro-PK studies. Inside, you get a practical toolkit. You will learn to define aims with constraint-aware clarity, pair intention with the right emotional state, design simple protocols for health, stress, performance, and decision-making, and build feedback loops that reduce bias and increase learning. The book also offers ethical guardrails for intercessory practices and scripts for working with clinicians and communities without hype. This is not a sermon and not a takedown. It is a field guide for thoughtful readers who want methods, not slogans. By the end, you will hold a disciplined model of how intention operates in real life, plus small, auditable practices you can use and refine when it matters most.
The Science of Prayer
SKU: 9789374120200
$25.99 Regular Price
$20.06Sale Price
- Evelyn Hawthorne writes where doubt and devotion meet the measurable world. Raised among liturgies and laboratories, she learned early that a careful question can be a form of reverence. Her work follows ordinary people—nurses on night shifts, athletes in tunnel vision, neighbours in quiet vigils—who use attention, emotion, and meaning to steady themselves and, sometimes, to tip events. Drawing on the long arc from Augustine’s confessions to William James’s psychology of religious experience, and on contemporary cognitive science, she treats prayer not as a slogan but as a craft. She prizes clarity over hype, ethics over spectacle, and the slow honesty of keeping a log. When not writing, she helps community groups design small, auditable experiments in kindness and focus. Her aim is simple: to give readers a language that honours mystery while insisting on what can be learned, shared, and tested.
