Prayer in the Night

For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

** Winner of the ECPA’s 2022 Christian Book of the Year **

** Winner of Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year **

Framed around the nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. When she navigated a time of doubt and loss, the prayer was grounding for her. She writes:

"It was this practice that gave me words for my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter doctrines of the church—the church's claims about reality—not as rational, tidy little antidotes for pain but as a light in darkness, as good news."

Where do we find comfort when we lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.

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— Reviews of Prayer in the Night —

"This book is the rare combination of beautiful prose and weighty theological reflection. It paints a picture of a faith that is still there on the other side of trite, easy answers that do not satisfy, a picture of hard-won belief. This is not just a book about prayer; at times the book becomes a prayer in its own right. It is, in the end, a reflection on what it means to be a Christian in the midst of losses large and small. I highly recommend it."

— Esau McCaulley, author of “Reading While Black,” Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College

"I know of few writers today who write as pastorally, prophetically, and poetically as Tish Harrison Warren. I know of few writers of any time who write of the deep, dark stuff of life with as much hope, grace, and beauty as you will find in these pages. Prayer in the Night will bring to the darkness in your life a light that will carry you through the days."

— Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well and Fierce Convictions

"By the light of an ancient nighttime prayer, this book tenderly and thoroughly explores the beautiful and precarious reality of our shared human life. And it illuminates for us the ultimate Christian question: what it means to love and be loved by a God who made us as vulnerable as we are, and also made himself as vulnerable as we are."

— Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making and Strong and Weak

“We are free, in reading Prayer in the Night, from the weight of the practical, the expectation that we should do something with the book. Rather, Warren’s ruminations on prayer offer an invitation to rest in the unmerited grace of God, and to do so through the contemplation of some of his deepest mysteries. In an ultimate sense, nothing could be more practical; and yet nothing could better free us from the weight of our own labors.”

— Matt Miller, Front Porch Republic

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“Tish Harrison Warren wrote her new book, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, before Covidtide. But it reads as if she knew what was coming. It is a work of sacred melancholy. It was borne of suffering, pain, and death: the unexpected loss of her father as well as two unborn sons. It does not propose rules for life. It does not provide a plan for success. It does not dare you to be fierce, or disabuse you of your guilt, or advise you to lean in. In short, it contains no techniques and makes no guarantees.

What it offers is a prayer.”

— Brad East, Mere Orthodoxy

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“After the year we have had, there isn’t a person I know who doesn’t need this book. We may not have asked for the kind of refining we have collectively endured, but not all spiritual practices are taken up by choice. The most ‘shaping spiritual practices of our lives,’ Warren says, ‘are things we’d never have chosen.’”