Health and religion have always been intertwined, most obviously through prayer on behalf of the sick. Does intercessory prayer for sick people actually help heal them? For thousands of years some ...

The Catechism of the Catholic Church outlines five different forms of prayer: prayer of blessing and adoration, prayer of petition, prayer of thanksgiving, prayer of praise and prayer of intercession ...

When a landmark study suggests that intercessory prayer may actually hurt patients instead of help them, you have to wonder. Should your doctor prescribe prayer as part of your treatment? According to ...

A LOT of studies on intercessory prayer have been published in recent years. This research has returned mixed results. Some studies conclude that prayer improves health, while others show no effect—or ...

Too often, our practices of intercession are thin to nonexistent. The Reformed tradition shows us how to revive them. We live in a world full of public trauma and tragedy. Most mornings, we wake up to ...

In previous posts, I’ve noted problems with how most research on prayer for healing has been conducted. Researchers have attempted to design double-blinded, controlled trials of distant intercessory ...

Studying the efficacy of prayer is a sensitive topic: Depending on where you come from, you can either consider it offensive even to try to apply a scientific method to a spiritual process, or you can ...