Drawing on five months of ethnographic residential participant observation in a Czech Catholic convent (an apostolic community of nuns), this article examines how prayer is lived within an active women's religious community. In the community studied, prayer is not experienced primarily as a bounded chapel ritual or an individual technique of sustained inner focus. Instead, it takes the form of a shared, learned, and communicatively organized mode of everyday life. The analysis shows how collective recitation, brief formulaic prayers, and prayer-inflected speech circulate beyond the chapel into work, meals, movement through space, and mundane interactions. It also describes how prayer is distributed and delegated within the community, including a generational division of “prayer work,” and how “ordinary time” emerges not as the absence of religion but as a shift in social and ritual regimes. Rather than proposing a definition of prayer, the article offers an ethnographic account of how its boundaries are produced, expanded, and negotiated in the everyday life of a Catholic women’s religious community, contributing to the anthropology of Christianity and the ethnography of prayer.
Women are exempt from the obligation to study the Torah in rabbinic Judaism. This exemption is derived from the exegesis of Deuteronomy 11:19 and is discussed in rabbinic sources, including midrashim, the Mishnah, and the Talmud. The issue is also addressed by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah. This article traces the development of the religious norm concerning women’s Torah study from rabbinic literature to Maimonides’ legal codification. It argues that Maimonides integrates elements of Aristotelian philosophy into earlier rabbinic arguments. At the same time, historical evidence suggests that the lived reality could differ from the normative ideal. This is demonstrated through two twelfth-century responsa from Cairo that refer to a woman teaching the Torah. The article provides a Czech translation of these responsa and compares the normative position articulated by Maimonides with the social reality reflected in this specific case of a female Torah teacher.
