Prayer: The Mission of the Church

Catholic scholar Jean Danielou considers the centrality of prayer for the Christian layperson, developing the insight that the active, missionary dimension of the Christian life is in fact the "self-unfolding" of contemplation.

From BooklistDanielou's collection of meditations on prayer is part of a series entitled Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought, which draws its inspiration from the mid-twentieth-century Ressourcement movement centered in France and associated with the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote the foreword for this volume. The material in the collection was originally delivered as talks at days of recollection for the laity; its oral, popular, and devotional character are evident. The talks (as suggested by the subtitle) are as much exhortations to mission as meditations on prayer, and readers will learn a great deal about a theological attitude--permeated with tension between proclamation of uniqueness and exhortation to openness--that has shaped the Roman Catholic Church's attitude toward the larger world since Vatican II. Steve Schroeder