Erik Walker Wikstrom

Wikstrom looks at prayers from a variety of traditions and says that they basically fall into four categories: Naming, Knowing, Listening, and Loving. He shows how to look at a prayer and find its structure and gives suggestions on how you could then use that structure to create your own prayer.

A good portion of Simply Pray is devoted to explaining prayer beads and Wikstrom's ideas on how to use them with the four kinds of prayer. Most books on prayer I've read assume that the reader believes in a personal God that he or she is directing the prayer to, but Wikstrom makes a point of also offering suggestions on how nontheistic readers might pray - one of the strengths of this book. At only 140 pages, this is a slender volume that gets to its point without much fuss, and I recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the practice of prayer.… (altro)