In an attempt to marry thousand-year-old Orthodoxy and 21st century mobile tech, a Russian entrepreneur launched last week the first-ever application enabling the order of Christian prayers from iOS and Android powered mobile gadgets.
With the new app developed by InfoShell, a St. Petersburg based IT solution provider, an Orthodox believer will be able to request religious rites like prayers for health, requiems, remembrances of the dead, christenings or funerals, as well as donate money for the construction of churches, right from the comfort of his or her home.
The unorthodox idea came to Yuri Torgaev, a businessman developing loyalty programs with plastic cards and mobile devices, almost a year ago after reading The Unholy Saints, a religious book that must have much impressed him.
“On the eve of Orthodox Christmas [January 7] I slept and had a dream that I must create such a service. I woke up and knew two hours later exactly what it should look like,” Torgaev said in an exchange with the Russian business newspaper RBC Daily, adding that he had not been particularly religious before the nighttime revelation.
The new app, called Live Help, offers an e-primer in Orthodoxy, providing a gallery of clickable religious icons with detailed descriptions and sets of prayers that are dedicated to a specific icon. The functionality also includes the opportunity for a user to order a prayer in a temple that hosts the icon the user has chosen as his or her favorite, either with or without a financial donation.
There is still a limited choice of churches where a user can request a rite or prayer, and most are located in Moscow. However, the project owner says the existing catalog of temples will be constantly updated.
Donating funds for new churches is another option offered by the app. At the moment, users can only donate to build a chapel in Torgaev’s home village in the region of Mordovia in the mid-Volga area. As soon as this site is properly funded, Live Help will list more churches in need of financial contributions, the businessman promised.
Unlike commercial mobile payments, Apple and Google will not charge a 30% commission on iOS and Android enabled spiritual donations, making Live Help a “unique charity project,” according to Dmitry Kotenko, the CEO of InfoShell. He refused to disclose the exact cost of the unusual project, saying only that similar efforts typically cost between 350,000 and 600,000 rubles ($10,700-18,500).
Religious experts appear to favor the novelty. Pavel Kostylev of the Philosophy Department at Moscow Lomonosov State University told RBC daily that “perhaps, following religious apps like this one, Internet liturgies or SMS confessions will be introduced.” In Catholicism, for example, an iPhone app that helps believers “keep track of their sins and quantify the purity of conscience” is already said to be in use.
