The supplicant makes requests or recites an established prayer. But in a practice known as contemplative prayer, the opposite is the case. As Sister Thomas Bernard MacConnell puts it, the aim is to ...

The life of prayer is a process that has great advances and setbacks. There is no monotony when it comes to spending time with God. For those who commit themselves to pray, there is a daily adventure ...

Father William Meninger may need a cane to walk nowadays, and someone to plan his travels outside of the monastery, but the 83-year-old Trappist monk is still as dedicated to bringing the practice of ...

Long ago, Daniel Berrigan told me a tragic story about being invited to speak to a packed church of cloistered nuns somewhere on the East Coast in 1965. They wanted him to read from his latest book of ...

A contemplative movement of Christian Centering Prayer is quietly (almost secretly) reviving religious life and faith in society. Here in the land of “the spiritual, but not religious,” and growing ...

SAN FRANCISCO — The mystery of the interior life of God and how to experience even a glimpse of that life through deep, self-forgetful prayer is the subject of a new book by Fr. Donald Haggerty, ...

A few years ago, I wrote in this column about a course I teach on contemplative prayer in which we read six books and then read them again. My hope is to explore reading and rereading as contemplative ...

Pope Francis has issued a new wide-ranging set of guidelines for how the tens of thousands of Catholic women religious living in contemplative communities around the world should regulate their ...