Cregan Cooke, the director of communication and media at Redeemer Presbyterian, Manhattan’s best-known megachurch, told me that parishioners use mobile devices during services to look up Bible verses…and that the church has recently developed its own app, which contains a sermon podcast and community news. It’s been downloaded more than twenty-five thousand times.

Publishers Weekly recently reported that we are in the midst of a “Digital Bible Explosion.” Apps of the Bible are now more frequently downloaded than Angry Birds, and the sacred texts of other religions aren’t far behind: there’s an iQuran, iTorah, and a digital Book of Mormon.

There are devotional apps of other sorts as well. For Catholics, there’s EZPray, the Vatican-endorsed iBreviary, and Confession (which leads you through a personalized “examination of conscience” to prepare you for the sacrament); for Muslims, there’s Islamic Compass, which promises to give “the most accurate prayer times”; for Jews, there’s a combination Siddur and Zmanim; for Protestants, there’s Daily Jesus (a daily quote generator), Bible Blocks (a Tetris-like game that rewards players with a Bible verse between levels), and my favorite, Granny’s Bible Dojo (Granny cracks boards with karate chops, and helps you learn the order of the books of the Bible).

This list barely scratches the surface: as PW reports, numerous religious publishing and software companies were developing digital platforms well before the advent of the iPad; some have been at it for more than twenty years. And some of their apps are extremely sophisticated: QR codes embedded throughout the Life Essentials Study Bible link to video and audio sermons; Batoul Apps’ beautiful Quran Reader features audio recitations, commentary, translations, bookmarks, and note-taking capability; YouVersion contains over a hundred and fifty different Bible translations in forty-five languages. It’s free (like many, though not all, of the apps), and has been downloaded more than thirty million times.

The question of how, exactly, digitized texts will change religious practice has been a pressing one in religious communities for at least a decade. (A recent article in Christianity Today wondered whether the People of the Book shouldn’t be rechristened the People of the Nook.)

But the era of digital religion is only now poised to begin in earnest, ushered in by technological advancements—the widespread adoption of tablets and smartphones—and by religious leaders eager to harness the power of that technology to inspire and instruct their flocks.

Last week, I contacted leaders of several religious institutions in New York and asked about how the digital was being used in their communities. Cregan Cooke, the director of communication and media at Redeemer Presbyterian, Manhattan’s best-known megachurch, told me that parishioners use mobile devices during services to look up Bible verses; that pastors like having multiple translations of the Bible on their tablets to refer to “whenever they’re away from their physical libraries”; and that the church has recently developed its own app, which contains a sermon podcast and community news. It’s been downloaded more than twenty-five thousand times.

This isn’t surprising at a church whose senior pastor, Tim Keller, is an Internet video star with his own publishing imprint. But more traditional congregations have also eagerly embraced digital technology. Kevin Gabriel Gillen, a Dominican friar at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, wrote me that iBreviary is in common use in the church. “Walking into a chapel with an iPhone may raise the eyebrow of another friar, because they may think you are about to make a phone call or text, but the iPad seems to be accepted.”

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