ITEMS OF INTEREST May 11, 2009 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

with contributions from Misty Harris, John Dart

PRAYER HAS GONE DIGITAL with help from a new Web service that allows people to outsource their holy communication to a computer. On Information Age Prayer, the faithful simply choose their preferred passages and a text-to-speech synthesizer gives voice to them at regular intervals, for a nominal fee.

"I don't make any particular claims about efficacy, but I do believe that God is omniscient and He will hear (the prayer)," says creator James Mcarlos, who describes himself as spiritual but not religious.... The 23-year-old Bostonian says he designed the pay-per-prayer site for people like himself "who don't have time to put in the effort they'd like, to pray."

Rev. Gary Paterson, a United Church minister in Vancouver, says critics should be careful of judging the ways in which people find religion, however unusual they may seem. At the same time, he's wary that the service undermines a relationship with the Divine. "Part of prayer is our own personal openness to the Spirit," says Paterson. "I don't see how that can happen with a machine".....

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