San Jose Mercury News Reporter Lisa Fernandez writes of the growth of religious iPhone apps and the release of the Sabbath Manifesto app.
Religion on your iPhone? Faith apps grow in availability, popularity
Just before sundown Friday, a group of plugged-in Jews released a custom-made app to alert their Facebook friends and Twitter followers that they were checking out, logging off and generally not answering their e-mails for the next 25 hours.
Then, with iPhones tucked away in a cutesy sleeping bag, these frenetic, high-tech Jews met — in real time — at an organic ranch in Los Altos Hills to drink wine, break bread and honor the Jewish mandate of not using technology on Shabbat.
This just-off-the-shelf smartphone application, the Sabbath Manifesto, was designed by members of a Jewish nonprofit called Reboot. And it’s just one of a plethora of religious apps bombarding the online landscape as each faith tries to stake its claim.
Many see these electronic forms of religion as an extension of age-old concepts of study, prayer and evangelism. Others see the apps as potentially controversial, or confusing at best, when a Buddhist meditation timer or the teachings of Jesus are juxtaposed next to “Angry Birds” and a Netflix account.
What’s clear, however, is that the number of religious apps is growing at a pace impossible to count.
Read the entire article here.