OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of intercessory prayer, a widely practiced complementary therapy, on cardiovascular disease progression after hospital discharge. PATIENTS AND METHODS In this randomized controlled trial conducted between 1997 and 1999, a total of 799 coronary care unit patients were randomized at hospital discharge to the intercessory prayer group or to the control group. In...

¶1 On Sunday morning, Ms. B. dials into Prodigy, then logs on to the Prayer Line, a bulletin board storing messages from around the world. She scans a list of the most recent entries: Learning how to lean; Let me pray for you; My father; My mother’s stroke; National day of prayer; Please pray; Prayer for health; Ralph needs prayer; The father’s heart.1 These are the supplications of a group tha...

Long recognized as a defi ning feature of religion, prayer, paradoxically, has received only sporadic empirical attention. Recent investigations in the U.S. and the Netherlands have sought to address this gap by exploring the topic of prayer in programmatic fashions, signifi cantly advancing the state of the art in terms of measurement of the practice of private prayer. The present paper fi rst...

Discomfort with the integration of spiritual activities into marital interventions may be a response by practitioners to the weakness of available conceptual frameworks. We offer a framework that allows for integration of prayer into marital interventions (educational or therapeutic), and argue that when culturally appropriate, prayer can serve multiple functions in interventions that are consi...

Prayer and verbally answered prayer would seem to offer powerful evidence in relation to the question of human agency. Forty members of an English Pentecostal group completed a questionnaire on prayer: 25 reported an answering voice from God, 15 of them hearing Him aloud. The latter groups were interviewed and characteristics of phenomenology and context elicited. The voice of God cannot be hel...

M, et al. Effects of long-term microgravity exposure on cancellous and cortical weight-bearing bones of cosmonauts. Lancet 2000;355:1607-11. 6 Turner RT. What do we know about the effects of space flight on bone? Wood ML. An episode of ventricular tachycardia during long-duration spaceflight. 13 Watenpaugh DE. Fluid volume control during short-term space flight and implications for human perfor...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To explore the feasibility of implementing centering prayer in chemotherapy treatment and assess its influence on mood, spiritual well-being, and quality of life in women with recurrent ovarian cancer. DESIGN Descriptive pilot study. SETTING Outpatient chemotherapy treatment suite in a large cancer center in the midwestern United States. SAMPLE A convenience sample of 1...

The majority of the world population profess religious/spiritual beliefs and prayer is a form of spiritual activity common across numerous religious/spiritual belief systems. Three studies therefore examined the role of prayer in romantic relationships. Study 1 (n = 91) showed that prayer for a dating partner predicted lower aggressive tendencies and greater forgiveness of partner transgression...