Prayer

Melvyn Bragg examines the purpose and effects of prayer. Why do people pray? What did prayer ever do, the cry goes up, for those millions upon millions of non-combatants, civilians, children, innocents, whose lives have been ended by a savage variety of brutality? Do we pray for the benefit of God or for our own sake? Is it a good Christian weapon as Martin Luther defined it and as Mahatma Gandhi put it the most potent instrument of action; or is prayer simply the most essential form of self analysis? Or was Ovid right to see prayer as a way of changing the mind of God, when he wrote in The Art of Love, Even the Gods are moved by the voice of entreaty. People have prayed since the dawn of language - but why, and has it done us any good?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Professor Russell Stannard No other episodes
  Physicist
• Andrew Samuels 2 episodes
  Jungian analyst and Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex

Related episodes

• The Book of Common Prayer
  
  17 Oct, 2013 260 Social and ecclesiastical theology
• Just War
  
  3 Jun, 1999 170 Ethics
• Good and Evil
  
  1 Apr, 1999 170 Ethics
• The Age of Doubt
  
  9 Mar, 2000 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
• The Art of War
  
  12 Jun, 2003 350 Public administration and military science
• Rhetoric
  
  28 Oct, 2004 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Money
  
  1 Mar, 2001 330 Economics
• Fundamentalism
  
  22 Apr, 1999 200 Religion
• Reading
  
  17 Feb, 2000 020 Library and information sciences
• Virtue
  
  28 Feb, 2002 170 Ethics

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p005465m

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005465m

Auto-category: 204.33 (Prayer)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Why do people pray?