ABSTRACT
As a form of ritual language, prayer affords humans the possibility to communicate with non-human others. Through prayer individuals offer thanks, ask for forgiveness, request intercessions, and commune with the divine. The chapter finds that emotion is a rich site for exploration, as the existing literature only begins to touch on the multiple and dynamic ways in which emotion emerges in prayer. The chapter examines the topics of efficacy, examining how prayer may impact health outcomes; the form of prayer, attending to the ways that emotion is encoded in prayer; and the role of emotion in the pragmatics of prayer.
