What we need is a Shroud of Turin app for the iPhone
B&B writes:
LOL. No iPhone app has garnered so much attention in the blogosphere since Angry Birds as has Confession. What we need is a Shroud of Turin app.
Elizabeth Scalia, the Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos, and a columnist at First Things has reservations. She writes in The Anchoress:
My fear, though is that rather than encourage people into the confessional, the app will make it seem unnecessary . Regardless of how many times the app-writers insist that the thing is not meant to “replace” confession, our natures tend to choose the path of least resistance. It is not inconceivable (in fact, it is quite conceivable) that for a Catholic who has been away from confession for a while — one who perhaps has forgotten the powerful psychological and spiritual cleansing effect of speaking one’s sins aloud, or has never understood the value of the graces the sacrament imparts — the app may very well end up feeling like the convenient “middle ground” between not going to confession or going with reluctance.
For Catholics who are poorly catechized, poorly trained in the faith, this app seems to me to be one of those irresistible shiny objects that, when grabbed, proves to be a double-edged sword.
The NY Daily News has a front page headline that reads,
Holy App! Catholic Church okays new confession app for iPhone.
CNN’s lede reads:
(CNN) — Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been 300 tweets since my last confession.
Whether you’ve been "borrowing" free Wi-Fi or coveting your neighbor’s avatar — or, heaven forbid, something worse — a new mobile app is designed to help you atone for it.
Shroud of Turin app? I can’t imagine what it would do.
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
Here is a list of headlines that the Catholic League doesn’t like. I like most of them:
• ”Can’t Make it to Confession? There’s an App for That”
• ”Catholic Church Approves Confession by iPhone”
• ”Bless Me iPhone for I Have Sinned”
• ”Catholic Church Endorses App for Sinning iPhone Users”
• ”US Bishop Sanctions Cell Phone in Confession”
• ”Forgiveness via iPhone: Church Approves Confession App”
• ”New, Church-Approved iPhone Offers Confession On the Go”
• ”Confess Your Sins to a Phone in Catholic Church Endorsed App”
• ”Catholics Can Now Confess Using iPhone App”
• ”Catholic Church Approves Online Confession”