Prayer and Worship

Prayer and Worship was published in 1938 as the Hazen Pamphlet series volume prepared by Douglas V. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College. It came out of his work for the Hazen Foundation's study of religion in higher education, and it is addressed to students and teachers, people trained to think who were often unsure how to pray. Steere wrote in a decade when much educated religious life had retreated into ethics and social programs, and he set out to recover prayer and corporate worship as the living center from which such action draws its strength.

The book moves between the private and the shared. Steere treats prayer as a response to a prior initiative: God is already addressing the person, and prayer begins by becoming attentive and still enough to be found. Drawing on a wide range of writers across the Christian tradition and on Quaker practice, he describes silence not as emptiness but as a posture of waiting, and he insists that real prayer cannot be separated from the rest of a life. Intercession, confession, adoration, and the offering of one's work are held together as parts of one turning toward God. He then takes up worship, arguing that gathered worship is not merely individual devotion multiplied but a distinct act in which a community is drawn together under a shared attention. Throughout, he is wary of both dry formalism and unexamined feeling, and he writes plainly, with little technical vocabulary, as a practitioner rather than a system-builder.

Steere went on to become one of the most widely read Quaker writers on the devotional life, and this early book shows the concerns that shaped his later work: attentiveness, the unity of contemplation and action, and the need for ordinary people to be taught how to pray. It remains useful because its question has not aged. People who live among constant demands still need someone to explain, without sentimentality, what it means to stop and listen.

Who should read this: Anyone who prays haltingly, who finds corporate worship hard to enter, or who wants a thoughtful, unadorned introduction to the contemplative strand of Quaker and wider Christian devotion. It suits readers who want practical orientation grounded in the tradition rather than technique. It is not for those looking for a step-by-step method, a work of academic theology, or a book that engages the questions of our own decade directly.