From the category archives:

Mobile

Twittorah

December 5, 2009

Rabbi Ben Greenberg has collected a number of readings from the Torah – re-tweeted by a selection of Jewish users – into a book available from internet self-publisher Lulu. Not everyone is pleased with the marriage of religion and social media, however, and Corey Hodges warned against obscuring Christianity beneath layers of entertainment, in his [...]

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Qur’an.mp3

September 11, 2009

We’ve been told that the iPod’s earphones may damage our hearing and distract us from traffic, but now a scholar from the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo has warned that listening to recordings of the Qur’an is dangerous for the soul. Sheik Gamal Qutb has warned that if someone listens to the Qur’an in public (presumably [...]

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Strict seminarians have to share an email account

August 31, 2009

Just like in the Stone Age! Seminarians at the Redemptoris Mater House of Formation (peopled by those called from the Neocatechumenal Way) on the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization campus in Denver (they can also be found all over the world, including Perth and Sydney) lead a more disciplined life than their [...]

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‘Tweeting Wall’? ‘Twestern Wall? ‘Twailing Wall’?

July 24, 2009

T’were awful puns, I know. Twitter user @TheKotel has established a free service whereby prayers tweeted on his profile will be printed and placed in the Western or ‘Wailing’ Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. This is by no means an ‘official’ service, and the associated website’s FAQ attributes it to “a young man [...]

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Obama may have an iPod, but still uses his Blackberry

July 6, 2009

Rumours of Obama using a Zune may have been totally bogus, but that doesn’t mean he’s extended his love of Apple to replacing the treasured BlackBerry with an iPhone. Obama receives daily prayers to his smartphone from the White House’s “faith director” Joshua DuBois. DuBois is a Pentecostal minister who signed on to the Obama [...]

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PopeTube

May 23, 2009

No longer do you need to make the long trek all the way to St Peter’s to see the Pope: now you can stream him direct to your smartphone! The Pope2You portal features links to their Facebook and iPhone apps, WikiCath and the Vatican’s YouTube channel. This is something of a turn-around for the Vatican, [...]

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The New Twitterment

April 11, 2009

Bach’s Matthäuspassion takes almost 5 hours to perform in full, and the passion plays at Bozen in Tyrol were known to last for 7 days. Wall Street’s attention span is a bit more meagre, however, and from 12-3pm the Episcopalian Trinity Church delivered a passion play via Twitter in no more than 140-character ‘tweets’. Dramatis [...]

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Italian bishops call for moratorium on digital media on Lenten Fridays

March 10, 2009

Several bishops of Italian dioceses have suggested their parishioners give up modern technology alongside meat on Fridays during Lent. Turin has suggested not watching television during the fast month, while Modena, southern Bari and a few other dioceses asked for a ban on text messaging on Fridays. The Modena diocese stated this is to draw [...]

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False Dalai Lama flees People’s Republic of Twitter

February 10, 2009

Twitter have suspended an account that purported to belong to the Dalai Lama, although there has been no report as to how they discovered it wasn’t genuine. In only a few days the account had attracted tens of thousands of subscribers, making it probably Twitter’s highest-profile suspension. I can only assume this anti-Dalai Lama will [...]

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Italian priests find excuse to use iPhones during sermons

December 23, 2008

Padre Paolo Padrini has teamed up with programmer and Hip-Hop enthusiast Dimitri Giani to create the iBreviary, an iPhone app that contains the Roman Catholic prayer breviary so priests don’t need to carry around those cumbersome books any more. I mean, have you seen a Bible recently? Those things are heavy! English priests be warned, [...]

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