Fr Alexander Men was a remarkable priest in Moscow during the last decades of Communism. He was controversial, not just with the Communist authorities owing to his active promotion of Christianity in the three parishes that he served, and his facility for evading the prohibitions on promoting Christianity by preaching at all services, including funerals, but also with other Orthodox, who suspected him of departing from tradition – such suspicions were even found among Orthodox in the comfortable West. He was murdered by an axe-blow to the head on his way to church on the morning of 9 September 1990. He was an extraordinary priest in many ways: not just for the boldness with which he built up his Christian communities, and his openness to ecumenism, but for his thirst to understand Christianity in the context of world religions, composing a seven-volume work, In search of the way, the truth, and the life (volumes appearing between 1968 and 1983, originally published abroad as ‘tamizdat’). He was a self-made scholar, having been prevented from taking his examinations in biology when it was discovered that he was a churchgoer; his theological learning was based on following the reading lists of the Spiritual Academy, and wide, random reading. This volume contains his Practical guide to prayer, only published after his death, though it circulated in unpublished form before then. It is truly practical – straightforward and down-to-earth; it is also utterly traditional, though presented in a lively way, aware of the problems of praying in the modern world.