lutheran-prayers

An offline-first, TypeScript npm package providing 411 confessional Lutheran prayers in English and Amharic, with an Ethiopian-calendar-anchored prayer-of-the-day scheduler.

lutheran-prayers ships a vetted, fully bilingual corpus behind a small synchronous API. It works in browsers, React Native, Node, Bun, and Deno — with no network calls. Calendar logic uses kenat (MIT, zero deps) for Ethiopian date conversion and Bahire Hasab feast computation.

Installation

pnpm add lutheran-prayers kenat
# or: npm install lutheran-prayers kenat

kenat is a required runtime dependency. It is a normal npm install — your bundler will dedupe it naturally.

Quickstart

import {
  getPrayerOfTheDay,
  getPrayerById,
  getDayContext,
  listCategories,
  searchPrayers,
} from 'lutheran-prayers';

// Today's prayer, in English
const today = getPrayerOfTheDay();
console.log(today.title, '—', today.attribution?.author);

// The same prayer, in Amharic
const todayAm = getPrayerOfTheDay({ language: 'am' });

// What liturgical season is today?
const ctx = getDayContext();
// → { date: '2026-04-27', seasonKey: 'after_easter', weekday: 1, isSunday: false, isPrincipalFeast: false }

// Look up a specific prayer
const p001 = getPrayerById('P001');               // Johann Gerhard's prayer on original sin
const p001Am = getPrayerById('P001', { language: 'am' });

// Browse
const cats = listCategories();                     // 28 categories with prayer counts
const luther = searchPrayers('Luther', { limit: 5 });

All functions are synchronous. Default language is en; pass { language: 'am' } for Amharic. Unknown IDs return null. Invalid language codes throw.

API

| Function | Returns | Notes | | --- | --- | --- | | getPrayerOfTheDay(options?) | Prayer | Liturgical-calendar-aware. See Prayer of the Day below. | | getPrayerById(id, options?) | Prayer \| null | O(1) lookup; returns null for unknown ids. | | listPrayers(options?) | PrayerSummary[] | All 411 summaries. No bodies — use getPrayerById for those. | | listPrayersByCategory(id, options?) | PrayerSummary[] | Empty array for unknown categories. | | listCategories(options?) | Category[] | All 28 categories with prayer counts. | | searchPrayers(query, options?) | PrayerSummary[] | Case-insensitive substring across titles, authors, source titles. | | getDayContext(date?) | DayContext | Season, weekday, principal-feast flag for any date. |

Full TypeScript types ship with the package — your IDE will surface them on hover.

Prayer of the Day

The scheduler implements a deterministic liturgical strategy:

• Ethiopian-anchored seasons. Christmas = Genna (Jan 7), Epiphany = Timket (Jan 19), New Year = Enkutatash (~Sept 11). Lent and Easter use the Bahire Hasab computus via kenat. Advent is the four Sundays before Genna.
• Weekday-aware category priority. Mondays favor daily, Wednesdays favor confession (especially in Advent and Lent), Thursdays favor thanksgiving, Saturdays favor general. Sundays and principal feasts always lead with the season-specific prayer.
• Cooldown ladder. A prayer cannot repeat for at least 28 days. If no candidate survives, the cooldown relaxes to 14, 7, then 1 — but the same prayer never appears on consecutive days.
• Principal feasts (isPrincipalFeast: true): Genna, Timket, Hosanna (Palm), Fasika (Easter), Erget (Ascension), Paraclete (Pentecost), Trinity Sunday, Enkutatash, Meskel.

The schedule is deterministic from a fixed anchor of 2025-01-01. The first call to getPrayerOfTheDay(date) walks forward day-by-day from the anchor to compute and cache picks (~50ms cold for a date inside the first year, <1ms for cached dates). State is module-scoped — no persistence required from the consumer.

Dates before the anchor throw with a clear error. There is no upper bound: future dates extend the cache lazily.

Bilingual coverage

The current corpus has 100% Amharic coverage for all 411 prayers, plus curated English + Amharic display names for all 28 categories. Translation policy is sense_first_faithful — meaning preserved over word-for-word literal rendering.

The Prayer.languageFallback field is reserved for future translations that may be incomplete; it is currently never set.

Confessional stance

The corpus is curated from confessional Lutheran sources, including Johann Gerhard's Meditationes Sacrae and Prayers (A Daily Practice of Piety), Luther's catechisms, and historic Lutheran prayer books. Every prayer carries an attribution object with author, dates, source title, and (where available) source page numbers.

Acknowledgments

• kenat by Melaku Demeke — Ethiopian calendar conversion and Bahire Hasab.
• The translators and source-text editors who prepared the bilingual corpus.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to add prayers, fix attributions, or improve translations.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright © Ephrem K. Getachew.