Electric Prayer

The Liturgy of the Hours, the Mass, and other things.

Liturgia Horarum as an e-book

Posted by universalis on 13 October 2013

Universalis has had Latin available as an option for some time, but only as the Latin half of Latin-English parallel texts.

Now we have created a Universalis e-book in Latin only. it contains the Liturgy of the Hours for every hour of every day of the year 2013. We will publish an e-book for 2014 before the beginning of 2014. UPDATE: this e-book has now been published.

The e-book is available in both Kindle format (for the Amazon Kindle) and ePub format (for all other e-readers).

The e-book is available as a free download from our web site. This is because (bizarrely) Amazon and the other distributors refuse to distribute anything that is written in Latin.

Each hour is complete in itself. For example, if you want to see (for example) Vespers for Monday 18 November, you look in the Index dierum, click on Dies 18 novembris, and then click on Ad Vesperas. Everything will be there. There is no need to jump backwards and forwards as you would with a printed breviary.

If an optional memorial falls on a particular day, you can view both the Office of the memorial and the Office of the feria. If a local calendar has a different celebration from the General Calendar, you have access to them both. Here is a list of the calendars that Universalis knows about.

Do download the e-book and try it out, and do recommend it to anyone you know who might find it useful. As well as actual e-readers, practically all mobile phones and tablets have software available that will read either the ePub or the Kindle format.

Parallel texts: a reminder

You can view the Liturgy of the Hours in a parallel Latin-English version on the Universalis web site: here is an example.

All the Universalis apps can optionally display Latin and English together, as can any Universalis e-books you create for your own use.

Posted in e-books, Liturgy, The Universalis site | 2 Comments »

Mass Readings in your parish’s page

Posted by universalis on 30 August 2013

We sometimes get emails from the webmasters of parish pages asking if they can use Universalis texts in their pages. Here are three answers.

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Universalis on Facebook

Posted by universalis on 24 August 2013

There is now a Universalis page on Facebook.

Just like the Twitter feed, it has a new posting each day to tell you the saint or feast of the day.

If you “Like” the Facebook page, you’ll see the feast of the day appearing in your own Facebook news feed.

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“Updates will percolate”

Posted by universalis on 4 July 2013

I am always grateful when someone spots an error in Universalis and lets me know about it so that I can correct it. (Or to be precise, I am annoyed by the error and grateful to have it corrected).

This post is about what happens to corrections and when you will see them appear in Universalis.

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Posted in Downloadable Universalis, The Universalis site | 1 Comment »

The hiccup in Ordinary Time

Posted by universalis on 17 May 2013

Someone has asked me why, after the four-week psalm cycle got to week I on Shrove Tuesday before it was interrupted by Lent and Eastertide, it now continues directly to week III. I thought that other people might have the question but not be asking it, so here is the answer.

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Posted in Calendars | 2 Comments »

No selection switches in e-books

Posted by universalis on 2 May 2013

The Universalis downloads and apps have blue arrow buttons inside them which let you choose different options each day. See, for example, How the Selection Switches Work for Mass. (The web site does the same kind of selection in some cases, but it does it using ordinary links).

If you print out a page from Universalis and you end up with blue arrows on the paper, tapping or clicking those buttons does nothing. The paper does not change.

An e-book is just paper inside an electronic box. Tapping or clicking arrows in it would do nothing. Consequently e-books created using Universalis do not show the arrows at all. This applies both to Kindle e-books and to e-books in the ePub format.

The selection switches for Mass let you choose which readings you want to use for Mass that day. For instance, on a memorial, you may want to ignore the General Instruction of the Roman Missal’s instructions (at §357) and use the readings for the memorial rather than the readings for the ferial day.

When you use the Universalis program on your computer to create an e-book, the program uses whatever selections you have chosen within the program. If you chose the readings for the memorial on a particular day, those are the readings which will appear in the e-book. So if you have particular preferences for readings on memorials (and also for optional memorials), go through the calendar in the program and set the selections accordingly. Then all future e-books that you make will respect your selections.

Kindle Fire

In order to confuse their customers, Amazon use the same name for their e-book readers (the Kindle) and their tablets (the Kindle Fire). In fact the Kindle Fire (modern versions) and the Kindle Fire HD are not Kindles but programmable devices, and you can buy the Universalis app for them, blue buttons and all.

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How the selection switches work for Mass

Posted by universalis on 15 April 2013

In Universalis you will see selection switches at the top of the Mass readings for certain days. What these switches look like depend on where you are looking at Universalis: typically, on the downloaded versions, there will be a pale blue arrow at the top right of the page, which pops up a menu if you touch it or click on it.

These selection switches have subtly different meanings at different times.

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Posted in Calendars, Liturgy | 4 Comments »

Kindle e-books on the Blackberry

Posted by universalis on 3 April 2013

There isn’t a Universalis application on the Blackberry and there won’t be one. However, you can still read Universalis on the Blackberry if you want, by creating a Universalis e-book on your computer and then reading it on your Blackberry. Here is how to do it.

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The American Christmas bug

Posted by universalis on 5 January 2013

The last post, The Christmas Calendars, described how the transition is made between the season of Christmas, which reckons time in days after Christmas, and Ordinary Time, which reckons it in weeks starting on a Sunday.

There are two options at this time: the religious and the commercial. The religious calendar celebrates the Epiphany on 6 January, so the transition from Christmas to weeks happens after the Epiphany season. The commercial calendar celebrates the Epiphany on the Sunday between 2 and 8 January, so the transition from Christmas to weeks happens before the Epiphany season. The last post had a couple of elegant tables to show how it all works.

With adjustments to calendars come adjustments to liturgies. 6 January (when not the Epiphany) and 7 January (before the Epiphany) are days that are not part of the religious calendar, and yet they need to have a liturgy. The last post described how these liturgies were put together.

That is how things work in the whole world, both in the original Latin and in English translation. However, the American translation is different, and wrong.

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The Christmas calendars

Posted by universalis on 4 January 2013

At some point the Christmas season has to end and we have to get back to normal life. Liturgically this means that we have to finish the twelve days of Christmas, celebrate the Epiphany, and get back to normal life. Since “normal life” means starting the week on a Sunday, and since Christmas Day is on different days of the week in different years, this inevitably means an awkward splice.

This post describes how it all works in the context of the Liturgy of the Hours.

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