What happens when people pray? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann
PHOTO BY MICHAEL LIONSTAR
Tanya Luhrmann is best known for her 2012 book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, which examines how evangelicals and charismatic Christians experience and communicate with God. A cultural anthropologist, Luhrmann has studied modern-day witches and the assumptions of modern psychiatrists. Her columns appear frequently in the New York Times.
How did you get interested in studying people’s prayer lives?
My first project as a cultural anthropologist was studying well-educated middle-class people in London practicing what they called magic. They experienced divine presence; they saw and heard things. I was flabbergasted.
