Why Pray How To Pray

'...the most widespread difficulty today turns not so much on how to pray but on why we should pray and that as a consequence, we are witnessing a kind of demise of personal prayer.' -- Enzo Bianchi

For close to two millennia Christians assumed the importance of prayer even if they themselves at times neglected to pray or prayed poorly. But in the past sixty years many have come to question why we should pray at all, seeing prayer as an escape from the responsibility of social action or as seeking 'magical' solutions to life's problems. Others have argued that it is a waste of time praying to God who seem not to have responded to pleas to stop events like the Holocaust or natural disasters from happening.

Enzo Bianchi considers these and other objections to prayer in this book. He shows that such objections can serve to purify our understanding of what precisely prayer is. Besides considering the question of why we should pray, the author addresses the important issue of how to pray. He shows that prayer, correctly understood, remains an irreplaceable element of Christian life.

About the Author: Enzo Bianchi (b. 1943) studied economics at the University of Turin before moving to Bose, a small village in the north of Italy, where he thought to start a monastic community. In 1968 Br Enzo was joined by the first brothers and sisters and wrote the community rule. He is still the Prior of the community, which numbers about eighty members, men and women, coming from five different countries. The community is also present in Jerusalem and in Ostuni and Assisi in Italy.