How we work
Nothing on this site publishes because we decided it was ready. It publishes because named, qualified people signed the specific version you are reading.
Four stages, and a page exists only after the last one
Draft
Someone writes the guidance and gathers candidate texts. Nothing is public. Most of the corpus sits here.
Researched
Every text is traced to a real source: which collection, which translator, which year. Rights are established. A text whose rights we cannot clear does not proceed, no matter how well known it is, because a site built on naming its sources cannot afford to be uncertain about them.
In practice this means we lean on public-domain sources and on translations we commission ourselves. A surprising number of familiar modern translations are under copyright.
Reviewed
Qualified people check it. Not one person, and not one kind of check. See below.
Published
The page becomes visible and enters the sitemap. Until then the URL returns a 404 rather than a placeholder, because a page that exists but is empty is a small lie about how much has been done.
Trust is not one thing, so approval is not one signature
A rabbi is not thereby qualified to judge whether something is appropriate to say at a bedside in a paediatric intensive care unit. A board-certified chaplain is not thereby qualified to rule on doctrinal accuracy in a tradition they do not belong to. An editor is qualified for neither and is essential for a third thing.
So a resource collects separate signatures across four dimensions:
- Tradition accuracy. Is this an accurate representation of what this community actually does? Signed only by someone credentialed in that specific tradition. For non-religious material, by a humanist celebrant or equivalent practitioner.
- Pastoral appropriateness. Is this appropriate to use at a bedside, a graveside, or with a family in crisis? Signed by a chaplain or equivalent.
- Translation. Is the non-English text right, and is the romanisation right? Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit are where an unchecked error does the most damage.
- Editorial. Is it clear, and is it labelled honestly about what it is?
One person can hold more than one of these, but only where their recorded credentials independently qualify them for each. Being trusted is not a qualification.
A signature is on a version, not on a name
Every review is bound to the exact text that was reviewed. Change a word afterwards and that signature stops counting, the page comes down, and the URL leaves the sitemap until someone signs the new version.
This is stricter than it needs to be and we chose it deliberately. The alternative is a page that keeps displaying a real person’s name and credentials above text they never read, which is worse than having no attribution at all. Whitespace and formatting changes do not trigger it; anything that changes the substance does.
What we refuse to do
Several of these are things competitors do, and one of them is written into a competitor’s own published setup guide.
- No invented prayers presented as traditional.
- No manufactured activity. No seeded requests written by us. No counters primed so they do not display zero. A number here means what it says.
- No gamification. No streaks, no leaderboards, no collect-the-countries. Other people’s suffering is not a game mechanic.
- No thin pages generated because a template could. Eleven traditions across seventeen occasions is 187 possible combinations. That is not a page count. A page exists when someone wrote real guidance for that specific pairing and a qualified person checked it.
- No fabricated reviewers. The people named on a page are people who exist and signed it. Right now that list is empty, so nobody is named.
Coverage, and why the list is short
The standard reference book in this field gives one major tradition a two-entry section, because paper has a page count and coverage is zero-sum across traditions. We have no such excuse, so shipping a tradition thinly would be a choice rather than a constraint.
A tradition therefore opens here only when its coverage is genuinely adequate. The current list shows which are open and which are still in preparation. We would rather show you fewer than imply depth we have not built.