FROM THE PSALMS TO THE CLOUD: CONNECTING TO THE DIGITAL AGE By Maria Mankin and Maren C. Tirabassi Published by Pilgrim Press, $18

You dont have to be an environmentalist to wonder about technology. Will it be our great savior or will it be another thorn in the flesh, another opportunity to hear Henry David Thoreaus lament?

"But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools," he wrote in 1854's Walden.

Inside From the Psalms to the Cloud: Connecting to the Digital Age lies an excellent collection of prayers and worship materials that finds a way to help us understand the tool of technology. It is a useful green book, on that gives us a way out of the totalitarian world of the market and into a world that we make with words.

It seems just about everybody is on the other side of the time famine -- that pervasive sense that there is not enough time to do what we want to do -- and the trust famine -- that is, with so little time and so much information probing, whos exactly in charge? It seems many are deep into digital and connectivity overload.

As Thoreau observed, are we in charge of our tools and our time, or are our tools and time famine in charge of us?

In this optimistic book, the prophets arrive. Authors Maria Mankin and Maren Tirabassi ask the right question: Can a technology devoted to advertising be useful to spirituality?

They answer with a careful yes, taking us on the long road from the psalms to Twitter, by way of vintage wine in vintage wineskins, uncorked.

Mankin and Tirabassi gather the wisdom from dozens of writers of prayers and liturgies to show us a way to go deep digitally. Whether they are praying for energy that will deeply change all of our clocks, or for the return of the time when sanctuary for immigrants will become again dusty places with pews, or in any of John Dannons exquisite doxologies for the natural and ecclesiastical seasons, or beginning a prayer with the language of To Whom It may Concern, or encourage us to spend a day saying nothing that doesnt need saying.

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Psalms, Tweets and spirituality in the digital age