Prayer in Jewish and Christian Traditions: Identity, Practice, and Cross-Cultural Contacts

This volume, which is the result of an international conference with participants from the universities of Bochum and Tel Aviv in 2023, brings together twelve contributions that examine prayer in Judaism and Christianity as a place of religious identity construction. In addition to fundamental philosophical and theological questions about the counterpart of prayer and explanations of spiritual practice in intercultural contexts, literary strategies of prayer in the Hebrew Bible and in the texts of Qumran are analyzed. Other contributions explore the Jewish roots of Christian prayer traditions and point to current forms and functions of prayer in Jewish and Christian educational contexts and in the religious poetry of Shalom Ben-Chorin. The interdisciplinary analyses open up new perspectives on prayer as an expression of religious self-identity.