Introduction to two essays on prayer.

Two landmarks in the study of consciousness - Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience - appeared at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Freud understood dreams ("the language of the night") as a type of language whose complex associations of symbols yield meaning to the skilled analyst who can penetrate a dream's confusing manifest content.

James too brought an analytic attitude to matters neglected by his scientific contemporaries. He bravely initiated the investigation of areas of human experience subsumed under the label "religion." Consider his words on the topic of prayer:

The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this [prayerful] consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed ... It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion in the vital sense ... must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur.

Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about...

Almost a century later, prayer remains a controversial area of study, its "effects" still disputed. The two papers presented here take distinctly different approaches, neither claiming to yield conclusive answers, but each certainly provoking further valuable questions.

In considering prayer in linguistic terms (as Hamlet speculated: "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below / Words without thoughts never to heaven go"), Speech Act and other communication theorists have far to go. They need to ask what constitutes a prayerful communication act. Who speaks and who does the speaker address? What rules of dialogue and response apply? Ultimately, to what degree can we indicate the appropriate limits of observation and participation?