This article examines William James’s study on prayer in The Varieties of Religious Experience by framing prayer as a form of religious narrative that demonstrates the religious person’s construction and development of the spiritual self. The author begins by reviewing William James’s theory of the self and discussing its significance for multiple constituents of the self. By assessing James’s distinction between the terms I and Me, the author discusses how James’s notion of multiple selves provides a helpful framework for understanding the narrative nature of the self. In the following section, he investigates how James discusses prayer as “the very core of the living religion” by looking at the prayers of George Muller and Karl Hilty in The Varieties. The author argues that the Jamesian understanding of prayer reveals a particular process of how one makes sense of oneself and one’s image of God.

中文翻译：

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作为宗教叙事的祷告：属灵的自我和上帝的形象

本文通过将祈祷构建为一种宗教叙事形式来展示宗教人士对精神自我的构建和发展，从而检验了威廉詹姆斯在《宗教体验的多样性》中对祈祷的研究。作者首先回顾了威廉詹姆斯的自我理论，并讨论了它对自我的多个组成部分的意义。通过评估詹姆斯对“我”和“我”这两个术语的区别，作者讨论了詹姆斯的多重自我概念如何为理解自我的叙事性质提供了一个有用的框架。在接下来的部分中，他通过查看乔治·穆勒和卡尔·希尔蒂在《综艺》中的祈祷，研究了詹姆斯如何将祈祷视为“活的宗教的核心”。