Prayer appears in nearly every religious tradition and takes forms that would be barely recognisable to each other.
Petition
Asking for something.
Which is the form most people think of first and is one of several.
Contemplative prayer
Silent attention rather than speech.
Which resembles meditative practice in several traditions.
Liturgical and communal prayer
Fixed words said together at set times.
Which serves a social function alongside a devotional one.
Gratitude and praise
Forms with no request attached.
Which appear across otherwise very different traditions.
Fixed and spontaneous forms
Set texts recited at prescribed times against personal address in one's own words.
Which most traditions include both of.
Communities frequently disagree internally about which should predominate.
Posture and setting
Standing, kneeling, prostration, facing a direction.
Which varies enormously and is rarely incidental.
Frequency
Daily cycles ranging from once to many times.
Which structures the day for observant practitioners.
Intercession
Praying for others.
Which appears very widely and has been studied, with contested results.
Prayer and community
Gathering to pray as a social institution.
Which sustains communities beyond the devotional function.
Studies on intercessory prayer
Trials examining whether prayer for strangers affects medical outcomes.
Which have generally found no effect, and have been criticised from several directions.
Practitioners frequently object that the question is not one the method can address, which is a fair philosophical point.
Prayer and wellbeing
Associations between religious practice and reported wellbeing.
Which are confounded by community, routine and social support.
Private practice
Prayer as habitual and personal rather than institutional.
Which is how most people who pray actually do it.
Prayer in crisis
A reported increase during illness and disaster.
Which appears across religious and non-religious populations.
Learning about a tradition's practice
Its own texts and teachers rather than external summaries.
Comparative study of the subject
Scholars of religion describe forms and functions without adjudicating truth claims.
Which is the approach taken here.
Any tradition's own account of what prayer is and does belongs to that tradition, and outsiders describing it should say so plainly.
Silence in prayer
Contemplative and apophatic strands emphasising what cannot be said.
Which exist within traditions otherwise known for elaborate liturgy.
Bodily practice
Movement, direction, washing and dress.
Which are integral rather than preparatory in many traditions.
Children and transmission
Learned forms passed within families.
Which is how most practitioners first encounter it.
Learning more
Primary texts and practitioners rather than summaries.
Times and calendars
Daily cycles, weekly observances and annual festivals.
Which structure time for observant communities in a way secular calendars do not attempt.
The rhythm itself is frequently described by practitioners as part of what the practice provides.
Language
Prayer in a liturgical language distinct from everyday speech.
Which several traditions maintain and others have moved away from.
Objects and spaces
Buildings, mats, images and directions.
Which shape how the practice is performed.
Change over time
Forms revised, translated and contested within traditions.
Which is normal rather than exceptional.
A general note
This describes practices comparatively and makes no claims about the truth of any tradition's beliefs.
How this article treats its subject
Everything here is written descriptively. Where a practice belongs to a living religious tradition, the aim is to say accurately what that tradition does and says about it, without arguing for or against its beliefs. Those are questions for the traditions themselves and for the people who belong to them.
Where research is mentioned, the intention is to report what studies have found rather than what enthusiasts or critics have claimed about them, including where the findings are weaker or more contested than popular coverage suggests.
Where to read further
Primary texts in good annotated translations, academic histories, and practitioners speaking about their own tradition are all more reliable than secondary summaries, including this one. Most of the traditions discussed here have extensive scholarly literature that is accessible to general readers, and university presses publish short introductory volumes on nearly all of them.
Where a practice has physical or psychological effects, medical and mental health professionals are the appropriate source of guidance, and nothing here is intended as advice of that kind.
A note on why history matters here
A great deal of contemporary spiritual and wellbeing material presents itself as ancient when it is recent, or as universal when it belongs to a particular tradition and place. Neither of those is necessarily dishonest, and both make it harder to understand what one is actually doing.
Knowing where a practice comes from, who developed it, what it was originally for and what changed along the way does not diminish it. It usually makes it more interesting, and it makes claims about it easier to evaluate.
On sources and disagreement
Scholars disagree about much of this material, sometimes sharply, and where that is the case it has been noted rather than resolved. Presenting contested questions as settled would be more comfortable to read and less accurate.