Religious texts can now be searched, hyperlinked, downloaded, spliced, copied, truncated, emailed, text-messaged, recited with video accompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them.
Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sharing of recitation of prayers and liturgy. But as religious texts go digital, they acquire new qualities. What are the new forms that sacred texts are taking? And what are the implications of these transformations?
For many religious folk, digital technologies are viewed mainly as tools for communication and preservation. In 2002, Pope John Paul II announced at the World Communications Day that:
While the Internet can never replace that profound experience of God which only the living, liturgical and sacramental life of the Church can offer, it can certainly provide a unique supplement and support in both preparing for the encounter with Christ in community, and sustaining the new believer in the journey of faith which then begins.
Indeed, Pope John Paul II was the first pope to use SMS (short message service, i.e. “texting”) technology to send out a “daily papal message” to believers. Pope John Paul also oversaw the creation in 1995 of the Vatican’s Web site, complete with searchable encyclicals proposing, in 1999, that the sixth-century scholar St. Isidore be the patron saint of computers and the internet.
After succeeding John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI arranged for SMS messages to be sent to the cell phones of youth attending World Youth Day, a practice that has since become standard. This year Pope Benedict text-messaged a reminder about evangelism to all subscribers to the SMS service: “The Holy Spirit gave the Apostles and gives u the power boldly 2 proclaim that Christ is risen!—BXVI.” Recently Bishop Anthony Fisher announced the development of an associated online site for Catholic youth called Xt3.com, which Fisher describes as similar to Facebook. The spokesperson for the Vatican on these new developments, Cardinal Pell, has a page on Xt3.com, and invites Catholics to “come online and become one of my friends.”
This year’s World Youth Day also included a new feature, a “digital prayer wall,” to which participants could text-message from their cell phones and post their requests for others to pray with them in public view. GodTube, a non-denominational Christian answer to YouTube, also includes a digital prayer wall, available online at any time. The use of a digital prayer wall raises puzzling questions like: To whom are these prayers really addressed? And: Why do posters feel the need to publicly display them in a digital context? A quick read of the posted prayers on GodTube reveals that some prayers are invitations to other readers to pray “with” the poster, while others are addressed directly to God, as though He must “read” the prayer wall to learn the poster’s desires. Must God “enter” into virtual reality to read these prayers? If not, why post them at all, instead of directly and quietly praying to God, or asking a saint for intervention?
The digital prayer wall is similar to the Wailing Wall’s email service. Worshipers email a prayer to Jerusalem, where it is printed out by a courier and inserted into the wall on their behalf. If they still wish to pray “at” the wall via computer, 24-hour webcams record what is happening on location. But is it really the same thing to email a message to someone who inserts it in the wall on your behalf as to go there yourself? Is God “closer” if you visit the physical wall than if you simply view a digital image of it?
A replica of the Wailing Wall has recently been constructed in Second Life, the popular user-built online virtual “world.” The creator of the virtual Wailing Wall, “Xanadu,” explains that the digital wall, “is a peaceful spot to sit and grieve, pray, meditate, or comfort a friend. The wall accepts self-created notecards that are immediately deleted. The idea is to allow The Wailing Wall to bear away your burden.” Given the fact that both walls seem to function as a sort of “go-between” for the worshipper wanting to communicate with God, it certainly makes you wonder how the Second Life version of this activity compares to the courier service in Jerusalem in terms of what is “real,” what is “spiritual,” and what is “virtual” about prayer itself.
Other religious groups see the potential of digital technology for preservation and distribution of texts that otherwise might be lost or forgotten. The Asian Classics Input Project is the result of tens of thousands of hours put in by Tibetan monks and others supportive of their cause, all transcribing woodblock and other handwritten texts into digital formats. The “User Manual” on the ACIP Web site explains that the mission of the group is finding, organizing, “digitally preserving and disseminating rapidly disappearing Tibetan and Sanskrit manuscripts that hold the philosophical, cultural, and religious heritage of endangered cultures dating back more than 2000 years, [and to] make these books and ideas accessible to the world at large.” Now, the Web site offers thousands of texts, some removed from Chinese-controlled Tibet and available for the first time through ACIP. In their digitized form, then, the texts have a sort of durability and accessibility that they do not have in their original physical form.
As prolific as online religious texts and services are, not everyone is enthusiastic about sacred texts going digital. Indeed, some religious authorities register increasing concern about easy digital access to controlled religious texts by those who previously would not have the ability or perhaps even the desire to access them. The ease with which a Muslim can now read and search online databases of the hadith (sayings and deeds of Muhammad) has made some Muslim scholars nervous. The University of Southern California offers a searchable online hadith collection, in English, which is prefaced by a “warning” issued “especially for Muslims.” The warning explains that the early scholars of hadith were experts in the “critical science of collecting and evaluating ahadeeth,” and that students were required first to learn from the scholars how to utilize the hadith correctly. Today, however, “there is a real danger that Muslims will fall under the impression that owning a book or having a database is equivalent to being a scholar of ahadeeth. This is a great fallacy.” The archivists of the USC online database explain that it is “merely a tool, and not a substitute for learning, much less scholarship in Islam.”
Despite such warning, new technology is indeed changing the ways that Muslims access and assimilate religious rulings. In addition to using searchable digitized sources, Muslims today turn to imams online, call imams live on television shows, and even access imams via cell phones to receive new fatwas (religious rulings) for questions they may have. The recent proliferation of people claiming to have credentials to issue fatwas has created confusion and frustration among some Muslims (IOL Technology).
Who should decide, if anyone, what authoritative texts should be accessible, and to whom—when anyone with an internet hookup and a laptop can find whatever he or she desires at the click of a mouse? As argued by Dale Eickelman, Jon Anderson and the other contributors to New Media in the Muslim World (Indiana U. Press, 2003), new media access to traditional Muslim authoritative resources is forcefully challenging the most conservative modes of Islamic authority, allowing those who previously had no voice to decide for themselves what to believe and why to believe it, whether those in traditional positions of authority like it or not.
Tags: asian classics input project, bible, cardinal pell, internet, pope john paul ii, prayer, rachel wagner, technology, texting, vatican, wailing wall, world youth day
In traditions such as Eastern Orthodoxy, my experience is that Christians also need to worry about Authority in other ways than just the NT Canon.
The presence online of Eastern Orthodox Canon laws, passed by the Seven Ecumenical Councils, as well as other legal texts, has caused lay people and even local parish clergy to imagine they can make stipulations about what is "allowed" or not within Eastern Orthodoxy. Most often they make these choices based in a more literal or fundamentalist sort of reading of these ancient texts without an understanding of the context, or even full content of these documents. They quote from these texts the way a evangelical cites scripture.
Roman Catholics, too, are experiencing the same problem with their Catechism online: it's possible to cite "Chapter and Verse" of the document and trump your local parish, your bishop or even a wayward politician.
This doesn't show so much a problem with having the text online, per se, as it shows a problem with the literalist minds of the readers.
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