Jesus embodies a three-fold way of life: prayer, community, service.
I imagine wearing the wheel around my neck and consider what identity and authority such a tool might provide as a way of offering prayer to others.
Yet ever since, religious Americans, rather than secularists, have stood in the way of restoring prayers to public classrooms.
A year after President Obama proposed a "new beginning" with the Islamic world, now comes Samantha Jones, the provocative and saucy vixen from "Sex and the City 2" who, during a visit to Abu Dhabi, throws wads of condoms at a crowd of men on their way to prayer and simulates oral sex on a hookah pipe.
The lyrics to the song, which go by in a reverbed rush, are printed on the gatefold; they include the phrases "we are undeniably one thing;" "A prayer to you by way of us all/A prayer to us by way of y'all"; "all macrocosms are microcosms"; and "pass the God damn Buddha".
This article was amended on 21 September 2015 to correct the day of the Light the Way multi-faith festival of prayer and music to Thursday 24 September.
When the team is kidnapped, the soldiers cut out the tongue of a local missionary as a way of silencing his prayers, and afterwards hold up the twitching bloody lump in glee.
A shopkeeper once told me, "Being allowed to help a traveler, what more a Muslim traveler, is God's way of answering my prayers".
Now, the way this parable often gets read relies on an understanding of prayer as a way to irritate God into doing what you want.
There's a simple way to judge the efficacy of prayer: compare the batting averages of those players who cross themselves on approaching the plate with those who don't (The Way We Live Now, Jim Holt, Nov. 7).
