| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rick Ostrander. The Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer, and American Culture 1870–1930. (Religion in America Series.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. 232. $39.95.

Some believe that only when religion impacts the political world does it become historically significant. By this criterion, Rick Ostrander has chosen perhaps one of the most "insignificant" chapters in the story of modern American religion, or a history of the life of prayer. But if, in contrast, what religious individuals and communities themselves do is important, then the topic here is extremely significant. Prayer as an active means of communication between individuals and a personal God is deeply embedded in classical Western religion. How changing cultural and intellectual assumptions transformed it is the crux of Ostrander's story, and it is a central story in the great early twentieth-century debate over religion and modernity. Abstract questions of creation and evolution troubled few if any individuals directly. The question of the place of prayer in a world governed by scientific rules concerned all who tried to be loyal to both prayer and science. . . .

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