ABSTRACT
Contemporary neurological studies challenge the traditional belief that humans are body-soul composites by demonstrating that prayer and experiences of God in prayer may in fact be reducible to mere patterns of brain activity. In response to the challenges contemporary neuroscience poses to our understanding of the soul, this chapter advances the monistic theological anthropology found in the work of Thomas Aquinas and offers it as an alternative to the dualistic anthropologies which have dominated the popular Christian imagination since the fourth century. Aquinas's monistic theological anthropology opens up a way of imagining the relationship between the divine and human agency such that one can maintain, even in light of contemporary neuroscientific studies, and without any sense of paradox, that it is God who prays in the human being, and yet it is the human body that prays.
