(Roughly) Daily

… and now, as Cengiz Yar demonstrates in the always-illuminating newsletter Rest of World, technology is here to help…

Technology has transformed how we spend, study, live, eat — even how we sleep. And for the 6.75 billion people around the world who consider themselves religious, technology is also changing their faith. How people worship, pray, and commune with the divine is transforming from Seoul to Lagos.

Earlier this year, Rest of World set out to document the myriad of ways that religious believers are using new technologies in their daily practices. This illustrated storybook represents a broad spectrum of themes and trends playing out across a number of religions and countries that include Hindu temples made by 3D printers to priests that dance on TikTok. They speak to the unraveling tensions of our time as people turn to technology to simplify their lives, search for answers, or find platform-born fame.

These short stories offer insight into trends that range from the unique and unexpected to the artificial and financial. Just as influence, power, and need are shaping the world, they are also moving ancient faiths. This push and pull between old and new, between the ancient and modern, is now happening at lightning speed.

22 arresting examples of ancient traditions meeting modern technology: “Digital Divinity,” from @CengizYar in @restofworld. (Work supported by @HLuceFdn.)

* John Milton, Paradise Lost

###

As we ponder piety, we might recall that this was the date in 1582 that a new “technology” obliterated 10 days from the lives of Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland (and the miscellaneous states in the HRE) introduced the Gregorian calendar. While this was “October 5” in the rest of the world, those countries, adopting Pope Gregory XIII’s innovation, skipped ten days– so that there, the date shifted from October 4 to October 15.   With the shift, the calendar was aligned with the equinoxes (and the lunar cycles used to establish the celebration of Easter).   Britain and its colonies resisted this Popish change and used the Julian calendar for another century and a half, until September 2, 1752.

source