Where are your ‘praying hands’ at the moment?/Wo sind Ihre “Betende Hände” im Augenblick?

Exhibition in Nuremberg on Dürer’s Praying Hands – one of a number of studies for an altar that has taken on a life of its own.

People from all over Germany filled in questionnaires. Where are your ‘Praying Hands’ now? From left to right: bedroom, living area, entrance area, workplace, not hung up, other.

Owners are from all groups, but older rather than younger, Protestant rather than Catholic, women rather than men.

A room of pictures of people with their picture, model, carpet, T-shirt or whatever:

To my shock, the 10-metre statue in Webb City, Missouri is only ‘one of the largest’ in the world. (parenthetical remarks) has been there too.

8 thoughts on “Where are your ‘praying hands’ at the moment?/Wo sind Ihre “Betende Hände” im Augenblick?

  1. Not the Pharisees, as folding hands was not part of Jewish tradition. In fact, Googling for “folding hands in prayer” gets at least as many Islamic hits as Christian ones. The gist of the Christian hits is basically that nobody knows where the custom came from.
    In the Bible there are instances of raising hands in prayer, laying hands on people to pray for them, but nothing about folding hands in prayer.

    As for hypocrites, who are they? Funnily enough, the word always refers to other people, never “me”. I suspect there is no OBJECTIVE definition of who the term applies to, so we can’t say whether they (or we?) started it.

    • The hypocrites I meant were the ones mentioned along with the Pharisees as ‘whitewashed tombs’ – I mean, is folding your hands a form of whitewash? Not to be taken seriously.
      I have added a photo of a stamp from Oman – I think a first day cover with the praying hands in the background – so it is interesting what you say about Islam.

  2. I think these are the same jokers Jill Sommer blogged about. Appalling. With any luck the current economic troubles will flush these bottom feeders down where they belong.

    • Yes, I saw she wrote about it later – she will have got it from the pt list at Yahoo, which is where I found it. One always wonders whether to acknowledge findings on private mailing lists.

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