Prayer Addicts
• Wishful Thinking
From a review of Philip and Carol Zaleski's Prayer: A History:
The Zaleskis obviously admire their athletes of prayer and want us to do the same. But in curating this Prayer Hall of Fame, they have unwittingly provided the most devastating possible indictment of the religious mind. In ordinary life, if we encountered a man who repeats the same phrase 100,000 times a day, or a man who regularly falls into catatonic insensibility, or a teenage girl whose sexual desires fuel sickly fantasies of martyrdom, we would have no qualms about pronouncing them mentally ill and in need of treatment.
But if the obsessive-compulsive is reciting the Jesus Prayer, and the catatonic is a swami, and the girl is a nun, then the Zaleskis expect us to admire and revere them.