Show HN: Building a 'liturgical lightbulb', bringing the Calendar to life

Show HN: Building a 'liturgical lightbulb', bringing the Calendar to life(github.com)

109 points by angrygoat 2 years ago | 9 comments

ksenzee 2 years ago |

I love everything about this. Shopping for hardware now. If I get it up and running, I'll submit a PR for the US Episcopal calendar.

This is a bigger and more involved project than I think a lot of people will realize. One of my recent side projects was a Mastodon bot that posts a daily verse from the Episcopal Hymnal 1982 (botsin.space/@hymnal1982), and getting it to reflect the liturgical calendar was a job and a half. (It missed all of Christmas after Christmas Day; have to go debug that.)

082349872349872 2 years ago | |

I was looking up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_I recently (no points for guesses as to why), and was surprised to learn, en passant, that catholics simplified in the 1960s and now only have 4 different classes of feast days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints#Ranking_of_... ; I imagine whatever came before was slowly accreted over the centuries and, however simple it started, had eventually relied on people having lots of time to learn all its subtle corner cases...

antognini 2 years ago | | |

There have been a few rounds in the Church's history of gradual accumulation of feasts followed by a simplification.

A little while back I wrote some code to calculate a liturgical calendar based on pre-60s rubrics. [1] It was a fairly complicated project. There have been a few edge cases that have come up over the years. (E.g., if Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, does it take precedence over the 4th Sunday of Advent? If the Feast of St. John falls on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, which takes precedence?)

[1]: https://github.com/joe-antognini/tridentine_calendar

angrygoat 2 years ago | |

Awesome! Have a look at https://github.com/grahame/church-calendar which the current code uses; it should be fairly easy to add the Episcopalian calendar. One neat thing with my church-calendar library is extensive metadata, so you can find out more about the feasts (Wiki, but also the CoE and Episcopal books of lesser feasts.)

kstrauser 2 years ago |

Clever! I love seeing super-niche projects that neatly solve one person’s problem.

bitwize 2 years ago |

I am not a Christian... but my wife's family are Episcopalians and would appreciate this. I bet I could convince her uncle to build one.

zerojames 2 years ago |

This is delightful!

wscourge 2 years ago |

TIL: video in README.md works if you simply paste a link into it.

angrygoat 2 years ago | |

I was surprised too – and if you use Github's inbuilt editor for `README.md` you can literally drop an mp4 file on the editor and it uploads it and pastes in the link. Quite fancy!

https://github.blog/2021-05-13-video-uploads-available-githu...