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."

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