Blessing our tech devices
Over at Sistertech.com a news item about the blessing of smart phones and tech devices.
Forgiveness and prayer
New study on prayer and forgiveness. Here are the experiments:
The new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, draws data from 119 people over two experiments.
In the first, participants assigned to say a single prayer for their romantic partner reported a greater willingness to be forgiving of that person than did participants who were asked to describe their partner to a recording device “as if they were (talking) to a parent.”
The second study was more revealing, with participants – all of whom were comfortable with prayer – split into three groups: those asked to pray for a friend, those asked to pray about any topic, and those asked to think positive thoughts about a friend every day for four weeks.
People in the first group were much more likely to be forgiving of that friend than those in either of the latter two groups, which notably showed no significant differences between them. The first group also expressed more “selfless concern” during the testing period.
Is it just me or do these experiments seem rather silly? Why wouldn’t you be more forgiving of a person rather than a thing posing as a person (the recorder). Similarly, the connection one has with a friend is usually stronger than one has with a “topic” with which one is concerned.
Asking a doctor for prayer
When do doctors or other medical professionals enter into prayer with their patients? In a study published in a recent issue of the Souther Medical Journal sociologists from Brandeis and Rice Universities examined patient requests for prayer.
The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 30 academic pediatricians and pediatric oncologists at 13 leading academic medical centers around the country. They found that families most frequently raise the topic of prayer in response to a seriously ill or dying child.
The study found that pediatricians respond to requests for prayer in one of four ways: they participate in the prayers; they accommodate the prayers but don’t participate; they reframe the prayers, or they direct the families and patients to other religious and spiritual resources like hospital chaplains.
Did we pray hard enough?
Politics aside, this brings up a problem: the problem of prayer. Does God or the Cosmos or whatever hear our prayers? Are they “answered”? What happens if we make a mistake when we pray?