iReligion 2.0
The Telegraph
reports that
Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of Ireland’s Roman Catholics, has urged social network users to start sending daily prayers by text, Twitter or e-mail.
This, of course, could be the start of something huge: if tweeted
prayers are as good as spoken ones (contest for the comments section:
condense the Lord’s Prayer into 140 characters), then the sky’s the
limit.
Imagine: you add a dinner date on your PDA. When it gets added to your
calendar server, it sends a request to the Catholic church’s server,
with the XML equivalent of “forgive me, father, for I have committed
gluttony”. The church’s expert system analyzes this request behind the
scenes, and responds with something like “say five Hail Marys”
(properly encapsulated in XML, of course). Your home computer then
schedules a time to tweet five Hail Marys while you sleep.
At MyVatican, you can view your history confession, schedule
preemptive penance, friend saints and other intercessors, buy relics
at the online shop, and follow your favorite priests as they get
shuffled from one parish to the next.
What would be really cool would be if they wikified the
Catholic Encyclopedia.
Though I assume that [citation needed] would be
replaced by [must be taken on faith].