Reflection for January 16

Absolution App
Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one another's sins.... Online anonymity is most frequently associated with the cruelty of masked trolls, seduction by gender dissimulators, and financial scams. We forget too easily that online facelessness also facilitates the sacred possibilitites of the masked ritual, the voting booth, and the therapist's couch. From their first moments, online spaces have mingled the privacy of the truck stop bathroom wall and that of the confessional. Penance on the iPhone, whether or not it grows from its larval state, is a fascinatingly unabashed conjunction of the two (Religion Dispatches, cited at www.episcopalcafe.com).