Praying with Every Heart: Orienting Our Lives to the Wholeness of the World - Hardcover

by Cláudio Carvalhaes (Author), Daisy Machado (Foreword by), Marc H. Ellis (Afterword by)

This book develops an understanding of prayer from a liberation-theological perspective. "Praying with" offers a distinctive way of praying that can help orient our prayers around the "where" we pray and "with whom" we pray as the locus of the body's and heart's theological praxis. The book helps create language to pray with people and in situations we are not used to praying with; it insists on praying amidst racism, poverty, violence, and suffering; it calls us to pray at night and at the end of the world when we are overcome by fear, hurt, climate disaster, or economic impoverishment; it ventures into interfaith prayer settings; and it claims a sense of "self" that is not discrete, encapsulated in its own thinking or feeling--rather, it understands the notion of the self as entangled with the whole earth and each sentient and nonsentient being. Thus, to "pray with" in this book is to take the location of one's prayer more seriously and, individually and collectively, to gain an awareness of our grounding and positionality, therefore creating a theological structure that assumes both the listening of our own heart and the voices of everything around us.

Author Biography

Cláudio Carvalhaes is Associate Professor of Worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of Liturgies from Below: Praying with People at the Ends of the World (2020); What's Worship Got to Do With It? Interpreting Life Liturgically (2018); Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives--Only One Is Holy (2015); and Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (2013).