Common Prayer

Why worship? In this superb new collection of essays, lay people, clergy, poets, theologians, musicians, novelists, and scholars offer personal, profound, and provocative reflections on their experience of worship in The Episcopal Church. Through their flesh-and-blood stories of longing, loss, and love, we encounter the God who meets us in common prayer.

Contributors to the book include:
J. Neil Alexander
Fred Bahnson
Michael Battle
Luisa Bonillas
Rodney Clapp
Kim Edwards
Melissa Deckman Fallon
Stephen Fowl
Paul Fromberg
Katherine Greene-McCreight
Cameron Dezen Hammon
BJ Heyboer
Rhonda Mawhood Lee
Ian S. Markham
Duane Miller
Joseph Pagano
Amy Peterson
Spencer Reece
Amy Richter
C. K. Robertson
Sophfronia Scott
Rachel Marie Stone
Lauren Winner

""This gracefully edited collection is a window into the transformative experience of shared liturgy in all its particularity, difficulty, and beauty. May these honest reflections open the eyes of our faith.""
--Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion and City of God: Faith in the Streets

""If Anglicanism claims to be catholic and reformed, then this winsome volume has the best of both: catholic in liturgy, protestant in testimony. Open this volume and meanwhile open your heart to be strangely warmed by the quirky, the moving, the profound, and the playful.""
--Sam Wells, Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London


Joseph S. Pagano and Amy E. Richter are Episcopal priests, appointed missionaries for The Episcopal Church, and serve as lecturers in theology at the College of Transfiguration in Makhanda/Grahamstown, South Africa. They are married to each other.