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During adolescence. prayer begins to function less as a way to bend God's will to one's own and more as a way to search for better wishes, cope with diJicult feelings, and foster a feeling of closeness to God.William James (1902, p. 464) provided the following simple, pleasing definition of prayer and its significance: "[Prayer is] every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine. . . . Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion." Given the central role that James assigns to prayer, it is difficult to explain why his account is so brief and tucked away in a late chapter titled "Other Characteristics" (of religion). Even more perplexing is that since James's time there has been so little written about the psychology of prayer. Prayer's significance to the religious life and the paucity of research on prayer require us to take a closer look at its forms, functions, and place in the lives of those who pray.But how are we to understand prayer? To answer this question we need to look at personal (not institutional) prayers constructed to meet the demands of particular situations. And we need to look at how prayers develop. By looking at personal prayers and their development we can best hope to capture the inner dynamic of prayer, as revealed in its changing forms and contexts.Our purpose here is to provide an analysis of prayer's functions and a particular model of prayer's development in terms of those functions. To clarify this purpose, we need first to say something about the issue of development and prayer because it is not at all self-evident that religion in general and prayer in particular develop into states we can call "mature."The legacy of Freud left us with a bias toward seeing prayer as rooted in illusion, an activity functioning solely to make us feel better by avoiding ourselves, our troublesome feelings, and our sometimes impossible predicaments. Freud would have us face reality stoically and rationally rather than remain propped up by illusions that soothe. From Freud's perspective, there may be a time in childhood when we need illusions, but maturity means growing beyond this need:

This essay introduces the special issue, provides criteria for evaluating spiritual exemplars, presents a case study to illustrate how spiritual exemplars can extend our knowledge of spiritual development, and makes important distinctions between types of exemplars and between positive and pathological spirituality.Keywords: spiritual exemplars; criteria for evaluating; spiritual development; noble purpose; patterns of faith; spiritual pathology Spiritual Exemplars: Understanding and InspirationThis special edition explains the spiritual lives of famous exemplars, both to shed light on the nature of spirituality and its development and to inspire readers to refine and develop their own faith so that they can better enhance the quality of the world. The lives of spiritual exemplars give us embodied spirituality and provide us with essential criteria and clues for evaluating and explaining spiritual development. Most important, they show us the powerful role faith can play in motivating and sustaining effort in the service of noble purpose. Criteria for EvaluatingWhether or not an individual qualifies as a spiritual exemplar is, of course, open to interpretation. However, the fact that spiritual exemplars have universal appeal suggests there are generally held, tacit criteria for evaluating. I suggest six in particular, namely, goodness, noble purpose, success, integrating faith and reason, respect for diversity, and strong positive faith.The first criterion is the most obvious, namely, that spiritual exemplars are good. They are good in the ways they treat others (with respect, compassion, care, etc.), and they are good in the ways they OPEN ACCESS

IN EVERY group of preschool children at play one can observe considerable individual variation in the amount of interaction with others. However, a few children seem to fall outside this range of expected variation; they stand out because of the paucity of their social contacts. The focus of this study was on preschool children who rarely interact with peers (i.e. who are socially isolated from peers) but who are considered to fall within a normal range of intelligence and emotional stability. These children are of interest in their own right. In addition the fact that they fall within a normal range of intelligence and emotional stability allows for a focus upon what factorsother than basic skills in thinking and communicating-are required for the development of early peer relations.The central aims of this study were to describe how isolates as compared to non-isolates behave during nursery school free play sessions, how they are treated by peers and teachers, and how isolates and non-isolates react to changes in group size and structure. The goal of describing social isolates was adopted in part because there have been very few descriptive studies of infrequently interacting preschoolers and because isolates were thought to have been characterized in the literature in global and sometimes misleading ways. Terms such as shy, apathetic, withdrawn, passive, immature and dependent have been used to describe such children but without adequately specifying their behavioral referents. Although all of these terms may apply to social isolates, the terms are at such a high level of abstraction as to imply a wide variety of possible behaviors and behavior patterns, many of which may not be typical or representative of socially isolated young children. Also, describing the behavior and treatment of isolates was intended to contribute to a description base necessary for eventually accounting for social isolation from peers.The comparison of isolates and non-isolates was intended in part to specify the relation (if any) between the way young children behave towards peers and the way they are treated by peers. In the literature, the few descriptive studies of preschoolers' social behavior do not provide a consistent picture of how behavior patterns relate or fail to relate to peer •sociability. For example. Beaver (1932) found no relation between the character of preschoolers' treatment of peers and treatment by peers whereas Kohn (1966) found that ", . .the child gets what he puts out" *Reprint requests and requests for scoring manuals to: W, (

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