The study of religion is one of the founding preoccupations of sociology and there are lots of changes happening in the practice of religion because of the digital era. For example, the Gothamist is reporting on the two Jewish entrepreneurs who developed software that can turn an average BlackBerry into a sacred prayer book. They’ve dubbed their upgrade “The JewBerry,” and have sold it to over 10,000 customers for $30 a pop. Personally, I think they might want to rethink the name of the application, but still this sort of development raises interesting questions about digital technology and the practice of religion. With the assist of GPS technology, there’s also a kind of smart-mob feature as well as the software will soon enable Jews to create minyans—the 10-member groups necessary for prayer. Of course, Pocket PCs and Palm and iPhone devices have had Christian and Hebrew texts on them for at least 5 years now (less time, of course, for the iPhones), but this is the first such software available for BlackBerry users. For sociologists interested in the sociology of religion in the digital era, there are a couple of edited volumes – Morten T. Højsgaard and Margit Warburg’s Religion and Cyberspace (Routledge, 2005) and Lorne Dawson and Douglas Cowan’s Religion Online (Routledge, 2004) – but not much else. And, as far as I know, there’s nothing yet out there on mobile technologies – such as smartphones – and the practice of religion (please drop a comment and correct me if I’m wrong about that). This looks like another rich area for some sociologist to take on.