Prayer and Sacred Awareness

This line of work asks how people experience the sacred and how researchers can measure it. My master’s thesis used Waves 1 and 4 of the National Study of Youth and Religion to model how adolescent characteristics shape emerging adults’ private prayer a decade later. With Paul Froese, I proposed four dimensions of private prayer as a framework for the field.

A companion photo-elicitation study asks participants to reflect on their thoughts and emotions at moments of felt closeness to and distance from the divine, rather than reporting how often they pray after the fact. Related work examines prayer apps and context-bound sacred awareness on a Christian campus.