The right words
at the right time.
Prayers and guidance across traditions for the moments that matter in healthcare and at life’s edges. Every text names its source.
No resource is published until a qualified reviewer signs it. None has been signed yet.
I need guidance for
View all occasionsDying and the end of life
The last hours, and what each tradition asks be done at them.
14 prayers and cited guidanceBefore surgery
The hours before an operation, for the patient and for those waiting.
4 prayers and cited guidanceSerious illness
A diagnosis that changes the shape of a life.
10 prayers and cited guidancePregnancy and infant loss
A grief that many traditions mark differently from other deaths, and some barely mark at all.
Cited guidance across traditionsGrief and mourning
After a death, including the formal mourning periods traditions set.
14 prayers and cited guidanceAll Occasions
See the complete list of 17 life occasions.
Every tradition. Every occasion.
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh practice, alongside non-religious and humanist guidance for people who want something said without religious language. All 11 have cited background pages; 33 prayers are published across 5 of them, and where a tradition has none, its page says why.
Browse traditionsVerified wording. Not yet reviewed.
Every prayer here was transcribed from a named public-domain edition by two people working separately, and appears only where both copies matched. That is a claim about wording. Whether a text suits a particular person at a particular moment needs someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything yet.
See the verification recordHow Make A Prayer works
Sourced
From a named public-domain edition, with rights established for that edition rather than for the prayer.
Transcribed twice
Two people copy the same page independently, neither able to see the other's work.
Compared
Identical, or it does not publish. 8 texts are held back today, and we list them.
Reviewed
A credentialed practitioner signs the exact version they read. Nobody has signed anything yet.
Yours to print
A clean page for a bedside or a graveside, carrying the line that says where the words came from.
What is here now
The verification recordWhy a site for all of them at once
Most prayer resources serve one tradition. The people who need them most often cannot use one: Pew Research finds that 26 percent of married US adults have a spouse of a different religion, and one in five US adults was raised in an interfaith home. Add the chaplains, nurses and funeral directors who meet families of every tradition and share the faith of almost none of them, and the single-tradition site stops being enough.
That is the whole reason this exists, and it is also why the hard part is not writing. It is sourcing: finding a text a community would actually accept, establishing that we may publish it, and proving the wording is right. The verification record shows how that goes, including the 8 texts it stopped.
- 33
- prayers, each from a named public-domain edition
- 10
- editions cited, from Singer 1890 to JPS 1917
- 156
- cited questions and defined terms, all with their sources named
Questions about this site
79 questions about prayer itself →Is anything on this site reviewed?
No, and every page says so before you read a word of it. The prayers here were transcribed from named public-domain editions by two people working separately and published only where both copies matched, which is a claim about wording. Whether a text suits a particular person at a particular moment needs someone credentialed in that tradition, and nobody has signed anything yet.
Where do the prayers come from?
Each one names the edition it was taken from, its year, and why that edition is in the public domain. Rights attach to the edition rather than to the prayer: the Aramaic of the Kaddish is public domain, while a modern English rendering of it is a new copyrighted work. The full record, including every text we held back, is public.
Why do some traditions have no prayers here?
For different reasons, and the tradition pages say which. Eastern Orthodoxy and Hinduism can be served from public-domain editions and the work is not done. Islam and Sikhism cannot be served honestly at all: the securely expired English renderings are nineteenth-century orientalist work that no community uses devotionally, and publishing them would be worse than publishing nothing.
Is this an AI prayer generator?
No. The composer assembles prayers from clause banks written by people for this site, with no model in the loop, and it labels every output as composed rather than traditional. AI is used here for transcription and verification against a cited edition, never to author sacred text or to translate scripture.
Can I use this at a bedside or a graveside?
That is what it is for. Every prayer has a print view that keeps the line saying which edition the words came from, so anyone can check them against the same book we did. The guidance also says when the right answer is to call a chaplain or a priest rather than read anything at all.
Does it cost anything, or need an account?
No to both. There is no login, no payment and no account. The composer runs on your device, so what you type never reaches us, and the tradition preference is remembered in your browser and nowhere else.
Reviewed by real people. None yet.
Every published resource shows who reviewed it and when.
Prayers on this site were transcribed from named public-domain editions and checked against them, which is a claim about wording. None has been reviewed by a practitioner credentialed in the tradition it comes from, which is a different claim and the one that needs a person. When the first is signed, this is where you will see who signed it, which aspect they checked, and when.
How our review model works→