When the Soul Listens

Short Review: A good evangelical introduction to Contemplative Prayer. There is lots of good wisdom about prayer here. I listened to this on audiobook but I want to pick up the print edition eventually because there are a number of good one liners about prayer.

Evangelicals tend toward utilitarianism in many of our religious practices and prayer is no different. Much of my training and teaching in prayer has been in intercession (doing something). Contemplative Prayer is essentially anti-utilitarian approach to prayer. By itself, contemplative prayer is not all of prayer. So we can't over swing to thinking of prayer as only Contemplative Prayer (which Johnson does not do). But it is an important corrective to broadening our understanding of prayer.

I thought it was a bit overly focused on extemporaneous prayer (and thereby against written and fixed prayer.) That is probably natural because of the topic and the bias of evangelicalism toward extemporaneous prayer. But that is probably my main complaint, although primarily it is a complaint of the early part of the book not the later.


My slightly longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/when-the-soul-listens/