These days, it seems, all the world's a-twitter. Everybody from Senators to journalists are tweeting. The Abbey has joined the conversation in a unique way: twice a day we pray the Daily Office on twitter.The Episcopal Church has a blog on which Morning and Evening Prayer is posted every day. I have been using the Abbey's new twitter ID @TheUrbanAbbey to post short excerpts of these prayers daily.
A screenshot of tonight's Evening Prayer session is shown here. It shows (in reverse chronological order) the "tweets," or short 140 character updates, I posted to the public twitter timeline as I read through Evening Prayer tonight. Nearly 70 people followed along - some from as far away as Britain and New Zealand.
Among the responses to our presence and activity on twitter are several comments that the Urban Abbey exemplifies a "new monasticism." Others point to us as an example of a new, electronically-enhanced approach to urban ministry. Many of those who follow us are, themselves, taking similar approaches to ministry in the virtual world.
It is an exciting time to venture into the brave new Web 2.0 world. If you would like to follow along with us, join us for Morning and Evening Prayer each day by signing up at http://twitter.com/ and following the Urban Abbey at http://twitter.com/TheUrbanAbbey -- see you in the twitterverse!
2 comments:
It doesn't seem right for you to steal my work and just twitter away with it, with nothing more than a barely visible link.
I've been doing this for four years, a quarter-million visitors, thousands of services. Even if your intentions are good, you can do better than this.
Josh,
Thank you for your comment. We have been praying the Daily Office for years using the prayer book, but recently we began moving into the electronic world and stumbled upon your site. It is well-done and accessible.
We always acknowledge your site when we post excerpts from the prayers, and we’ve done this in order to help people find their way to your site, because it is so well-done. I do, however, object to your use of the phrase “steal your work,” since the prayers were not written by you and belong to all of us. There are several other online sources we could point to, or we could just reference the prayer book — we would be happy to do so if you would rather we didn’t provide links to your site.
Raima Larter, Abbess of the Urban Abbey
PS: A copy of this comment has been posted on your site as well.
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