Digital Commons at Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School
Abstract
What are the linguistic resources for teachers who pray in contemporary Catholic school classrooms? This article considers the intersections of prayer and language practice, and I make central two arguments. The first is that educational prayer—a particular type of teacher-led extemporaneous prayer in Catholic schools—is a linguistic phenomenon, a highly-flexible set of linguistic resources, captured within a special interactional frame marked by ambiguous boundaries which contains both prescribed formulaic linguistic properties and those which allow the performer to attend to real time classroom contingencies. Drawing on interactional data from a Catholic school classroom, this article delimits the contextualization of linguistic signs during prayer: how teachers indicate the connection between their words and the sociocultural frameworks which are relevant for that action. The second is that both interactional sociolinguists and Catholic school researchers would greatly benefit from attending to these linguistic features, from seeing prayer unfold in real-time
