Katherine Boyle, a practicing Catholic at General Catalyst who spearheaded the investment, wrote recently that she was struck by Jones’ chutzpah, after he pitched a religious app during a 2019 open pitch day at Stanford Business School. ![]() Jones announced in April the app had received $12 million in new funding from venture capital group General Catalyst, a firm which has also invested in companies like Warby Parker, Airbnb, and Kayak, to name just a few. We're growing really quickly and lots of people are finding out about it.” “We just crossed 10 million prayers completed on the app and 150,000 downloads or so. “We've reached way more folks than we ever thought possible,” he said. To that end, two and a half years ago, he launched the Hallow app. As he came back to the Catholic Church, Jones said he wanted to give others the experience of meditation that he had had. Praying lectio divina brought about a deeper sense of peace than Jones had ever felt with secular forms of meditation, he said - one that also left him grappling with the purpose and meaning of his life. “And the word that stuck out to me was ‘hallow’ in ‘hallowed be thy name’ and.that experience completely changed my life.” “I Googled how to do lectio divina, and opened up Scripture to a random passage, and it was Christ teaching us the Lord's Prayer,” he said. They laughed, he said, but they also helped Jones discover the contemplative, meditative techniques and devotions of the Catholic Church. Out of curiosity, Jones started to ask Catholic priests and religious brothers and sisters if there was anything to the connection he was feeling between meditation and faith. Jones said he was surprised to find that he was drawn to think about God, faith, and the spiritual life while he was meditating. It was during this time that he started using Headspace, a secular meditation app that guides users through mindfulness exercises or meditation based in the Buddhist tradition. But after college graduation, he became enthralled with the idea of meditation. In high school and college, Jones stopped practicing Catholicism altogether, and considered himself either an agnostic or an atheist during this time. “The short story is I was raised Catholic to the extent that my mother dragged me to Mass,” Jones said. Share A chat with Hallow’s founder and chief investorĪlex Jones, founder and CEO of Hallow, told The Pillar that he had the idea for the app after his faith journey took him from Catholicism to atheism and back to Catholicism again, by way of meditation. Mike Schmitz and Ascension Press, there is Catholic music and Gregorian Chant, as well as guided lectio divina reading, the rosary and other recorded prayers, among other features. There is the popular Bible in a Year podcast by Fr. There are recordings of people reading Bible passages in calm, meditative voices that you can fall asleep to. The Hallow app, made popular online by Catholic Influencers™, is a Catholic prayer and meditation app that markets itself as a kind of Catholic reimagination of Calm, or Headspace, which are secular, meditative apps. It seems like the opposite of what I should be going for in my prayer life.īut for the sake of Catholic journalism and all that is holy, I did it. So when The Pillar asked me to test out Hallow, a Catholic meditation app, I admit I was biased from the start: I was not super excited about having another reason to be attached to my phone. For Lent, I deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps. I’ve been trying to use my phone less lately. That’s about the extent of how I use my phone in my prayer life. I use my phone’s alarms to remind me to pray the Angelus, and sometimes I listen to Catholic podcasts on Spotify. I mostly use the clunky but trusty iBreviary app, as it has the daily readings as well as the Office of Readings and Liturgy of the Hours for free. My phone has been a tool in my prayer life for years. ![]() My parish pastor once called me the Most Millennial, and I’m here to accept my crown. ![]() The irony that I need the most distracting device to remind me to practice the rudimentary tenets of my spiritual and physical health - which I am wont to forget when distracted - is not lost on me. I have alarms set on my phone to remind me to do two things: pray and drink water.
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