God of absolute goodness and compassion wants to be known via the commandments and prayer as the only God for the human hand heart. In creedal faith, Christ’s presence is realized by the Spirit.

This chapter examines Wednesday’s meditation, which concludes with a long tract on the active and contemplative lives. It is preceded by sections describing Christ’s public ministry, healing miracles, and preaching around Galilee. While Christ’s ministry exemplifies the Franciscan vita activa, the rendering of these episodes in text and image also prompts the reader-viewer to reflect on contemplative ascent, the remission from sin, and the efficacy of persistent prayer. Repeated pictorial motifs, including mountains, food, and tables, encourage meditation on paradoxical pairs, such as descent and ascent, service and prayer, and bodily and spiritual nourishment, underscoring the interdependence of the active and contemplative lives.

Psychological therapies are another focus for entanglement with spirituality. Prayer has caused concern in the literature, particularly in respect of boundary issues arising when clinicians pray with patients, but the nature of prayer is explored here rather as a way of giving attention to things that are most desired. Scientific evidence suggests that prayer is a form of positive religious coping for patients. Mindfulness, with its roots in Buddhism, is widely applied as a secular spiritual intervention that is helpful in a range of mental health conditions. Silence has long been recognised as a significant and meaningful phenomenon within psychotherapy, but also has its place in contemplative spiritual practices. A theme running through these three practices is that of careful attentiveness, in which spiritual and psychological concerns become entangled. Good clinical practice requires careful attention-giving, so there is a sense in which treatment planning in psychiatry can be considered a kind of prayer, understood as careful attentiveness to what is most desired by patients. Examples are drawn from Christian, Islamic and Buddhist spirituality and practice.

Dante’s defense of the life of reason can guide our consideration of the most current concerns.We are more in need that ever of a theoretical basis for openness, for ongoing inquiry, and for a genuinely common good. Dante’s understanding helps us think more clearly about the dogmatisms of our age, which, as ever, envision comprehensive transformations of human life uninformed by the moderating self-knowledge available in the poem.

As our power grows, it becomes more necessary judge its use, to assess the relative weight of the goods we seek when that power is deployed.To do so, we rely on reason as a guide. But reason’s capacity to adjudicate among goods is widely doubted. It requires a defense. This chapter argues that a premodern thinker may best be equipped to meet this need.

This chapter focuses on a group of Christian elites both well represented in the necrosima and unique to Syriac Christianity: the so-called Sons and Daughters of the Covenant. These communities of male and female ascetics assumed responsibility for the practical and liturgical functioning of the churches, including, most prominently, the task of chanting psalms and hymns at ecclesiastical gatherings, including funerary processions. The necrosima contains a number of madrāshê designated for the burial of male Covenanters – as well as, this chapter suggests, one addressing the death of their female counterparts. The hymns provide readers with an intimate glimpse at the grief and anxiety that attended these community’s loss of one of their members, as well as insight into the strategies by which the bereaved sought to maintain ties “across the threshold.” This chapter accordingly examines the ways in which expectations of mutual prayer – by the bereaved on behalf of the dead, and by the dead on behalf of their surviving brothers and sisters – could serve to construct visions of continuity and hopes for eventual reunion.

This chapter examines early modern expectations of delivery and recovery from childbirth by women. Medical manuals expected women would give birth painfully but without complication, stay in bed (or ‘lie in’) for a month, go to church to give thanks to God for their survival and then return to their normal selves. During this month, they were also expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. Examining doctors’ casebooks reveals that women often sought medical assistance for problems long after delivery. Certain postpartum ailments like breast problems were often perceived as untroubling in medical print, but paperwork reveals that this often meant women could not return to their normal selves for months after birth. Although prescriptive models contained in religious and medical print may have helped to frame women’s experiences of delivery and recovery, they rarely capture the reality of the emotional and bodily difficulties they faced.

Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

This chapter asks what the main currents in classical Greek philosophy understand by ‘personal religion’. How do they conceive of the beliefs and uplifting they want religious people to display? Do we have the necessary conceptual framework to understand the phenomenon of ‘personal religion’. In the study of ancient Greek religion, philosophers are often revisited to find the clearest analysis of religious concepts, though mainly in terms of the individual integrating norms of civic religion. Yet in many places the philosophers refer to those concepts and virtues in contexts outside civic religion, thus opening a broader understanding of personal religion. In connection with this the chapter also investigates what philosophers mean if they refer to their basic principles as ‘divine’. Do they introduce new divinities? Or are they introducing new ways of dealing with traditional gods? This leads to asking whether philosophical life replaces traditional religion. Very often, this is just assumed to be the case, entailing the corollary point that metaphysics comes to replace religion. Yet a case can be made that philosophers themselves avoided this merging of metaphysics and religion.

Ch. 8 Jewish liturgy offers us a concise summary of Jewish theology. It gives us theological propositions, speech-acts, and testimonies about God. Liturgy offers a practical and dynamic Jewish theology that negotiates the contradiction of the God of Being and God as person.

Chapter 5 examines how George Herbert confronts the profound limits on human capacities to create worldly security. The security dilemmas Hebert addresses derive from a tension built into the basic organizing metaphor of his theological vision, an understanding of God as a king. On the one hand, Herbert understands faithful devotion to require a perpetual payment of praise. Herbert offers his poems as a kind of fiscal payment, a mode of praise and devotion that he wishes, in turn, to correspond with divine protective care. On the other hand, Herbert’s fiscal theology must accommodate a God whose care frequently manifests as affliction and who understands worldly security as antithetical to faith. This chapter focuses on how Herbert confronts the disconnect between these distinct definitions of security and strives to reconcile God’s sovereign concern for his subjects’ eternal salvation and the need for protection and care in this world.

This chapter considers the event perceived as the culmination of a good religious life – the final days and hours. The analysis considers deathbed prayers and the taking of sacraments, along with the presence of a priest, minister, and other visitors of the same faith or congregation. It argues that the deathbed – as both a site and an occasion – was an important prompt for communal religion within the home. The final days, hours, and moments of an individual’s life were recognised as a significant opportunity for religious expression for those belonging to all confessions. While some scholars have argued that post-Reformation deathbeds were increasingly secular, this chapter analyses numerous descriptions of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant deathbeds which emphasise that an individual’s piety and composure in their final hours were interpreted as a reflection of their piety in life. Dying was a process which required witnesses, participants, and visitors, both to provide spiritual comfort to the dying individual and to observe and learn from their example.

This chapter analyses domestic practices associated with childbirth. It considers how urban households approached and framed childbirth as an event of religious significance, by examining prayers that were said before, during, and after the event of childbirth, as well as ritual attempts to demarcate the setting of birth or the lying-in chamber from the rest of the home. Through an examination of the ecclesiastical licensing of London midwives, it explores post-Reformation attempts to regulate the female domestic event of childbirth, amid fears that it could be associated with ‘Popish’ or superstitious practices, and concerns that Catholic midwives, if operating undetected, would attempt to perform clandestine Catholic baptism. By considering personal writing and Quaker and Jewish congregational birth records, it examines the faith of midwives and invited gossips, situating the lying-in room within the broader parish or religious community, and showing how those invited into the home could be representatives of the congregation beyond its walls. It shows that such occasions emphasisied women’s relative authority both within and outside their own households.