Living Prayer

Morning and evening prayer for those seeking to respond to Pope Francis’s call for greater care for our common home.

“God saw everything that was made, and indeed, it was very good.” Yet human disregard for creation endangers that goodness. In Living Prayer: A Book of Hours for Cultivating Life, authors Alison M. Benders, Lisa Fullam, and Gina Hens-Piazza invite readers to embrace our role as servant-cultivators in the ecology of God, celebrating and sustaining all that is.

Following the pattern of the daily prayer of the church, Living Prayer offers a four-week cycle of morning and evening prayer to support a more sustainable lifestyle and embodies an ethic of care for our common home. Created with ecological and social justice-oriented individuals and organizations in mind, Living Prayer supports hands-on work in local communities, empowered by reflection and prayer. The book also includes a variety of green rituals to extend ecological prayer through practices that enlist elements of the reader’s environment to connect to God’s presence in the created world. It is an invitation to live the prayer of our hearts so that the ecology of God flourishes to cultivate the new creation.

Alison M. Benders, Emerita, Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University, is the author of the award-winning Just Prayer: A Book of Hours for Peacemakers and Justice Seekers, and Recollecting America's Original Sin, published by Liturgical Press.

Lisa Fullam is professor emerita of moral theology at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, and associate veterinarian at the New Baltimore Animal Hospital in West Coxsackie, New York. She has co-edited with Charles E. Curran four volumes in the Readings in Moral Theology series (Paulist Press). She is also the author of The Virtue of Humility: A Thomistic Apologetic.

Gina Hens-Piazza is the Joseph S. Alemany Professor of Biblical Studies at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University and Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She received her PhD from Union Theological Seminary in NYC and recently served as one of the editors for and a contributor to The New Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twentieth First Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2022). A past president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, Hens-Piazza is a frequent lecturer nationally and internationally. She is the author of Lamentations in the Wisdom Commentary series (Liturgical Press, 2017).