Barbie exudes a flirtatious attitude in her heavenly merry widow bustier ensemble accented with intricate lace and matching peekaboo peignoir.
One 10-year-old in my class wasn't buying any of it. He told me last week he'd actually been given one of the dolls by a 5-year-old cousin who had tired of it. "She gives me lots of toys she doesn't want," he said. "Most of them I give to charity. But not this one, no way. I threw it in the river. No child should play with something like that. They'll get all the wrong ideas."
So nowadays lesson plans are based on The Gospel According to the Simpsons, in which Homer stands in as Job, and The Gospel According to Harry Potter, in which the boy wizard's decision to walk through what appears to be a solid wall to get to the train that will take him to his magical school becomes a meditation on faith.
First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark., paid $279,000 to Bruce Barry's Wacky World Studios, a set-design company in Tampa, Fla., that specializes in Sunday-school makeovers, to turn a room that had sometimes been used for funerals into a zany Toon Town where buzzers go off and confetti rains down during celebrations like baptisms.
"When God does call us, it may be to a journey of danger and terror, with the possibility of no return, or it may be to the simpler danger and terror of confronting a boss whose practices seem a little shaky" (p. 21).
...parishioners with doctorates won’t be treated, as Muller puts it, “like sheep.” Post, the VOTF president, is a professor of management at Boston University and not one to be intimidated by authority any more than Muller is.
The program includes "praise aerobics" to the accompaniment of gospel music tapes, walking clubs, an eight-week course on fitness and seated exercises for older churchgoers. One person from each participating church will be trained to run local programs and pastors are asked to bring health into weekly sermons.
Church leaders attribute the discrepancy between belief and behavior in Christian marriages to the pervasive influence of the culture of individualism, narcissism and consumerism.
"We haven't done a good job of helping people to know how to integrate their faith into every dimension of their life," said pollster George Barna.
"What we wind up with are people who know some of the principles and stories and platitudes, but when push comes to shove, it's survival of the fittest."
[M]embers of the Porth Christian Centre at Elim Pentecostal Church, in the Rhondda, south Wales, dispute several points in the traditional interpretation of the birth of Christ.
They range from the visit by the three wise men to the belief that Mary rode into Bethlehem on a donkey.
Anthony Paige, a recent SUNY Purchase College graduate who started a pagan student group there, said Wicca appeals to some college students because "there is no sense of sin."
"There is a karmic law, but there's no scorn or condemnation," said Paige, who was raised a Roman Catholic and whose book Rocking the Goddess, Campus Wicca for the Student Practioner profiles college-age pagans.
German Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, perhaps the most powerful policymaker in Rome besides the Pope, told a Catholic news wire that the U.S. sex-abuse scandal was an "intentional, manipulated ... desire to discredit the church" by the media. The conservative Ratzinger offered a virtual Vatican seal of approval for recent comments by two Latin American Cardinals — each considered possible papal successors — who also blamed the pedophilia crisis on the American press.
A growing number of officials in Rome have become convinced that the cause of the U.S. crisis is the prevalence of gay priests in American parishes. In his letter, Medina Estevez called the ordination of homosexual men "inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky." A Vatican official told TIME the letter "represents the mind of the church" and hints that a watershed document on rules for seminary admission, expected next year, will bar gays from entering the priesthood.
Some scholars insist that Jesus drove a Honda but preferred not to discuss it. As proof, they cite a verse in St. John's gospel in which Christ tells a crowd, "For I did not speak of my own Accord."
Lina cited the need for the "spiritual cleansing" of policemen to rid the service of scalawags and misfits. This he added would be part of efforts to review the recruitment of new law enforcers to weed out undesirables.
Ironically, one of the earliest reasons for the public school system was to spread a Christianity-based morality. These days, many homeschool parents decide to keep their children at home to infuse their education with religious ideals.
Plaintiffs' attorneys and victims advocates say the documents show that Law continued to transfer problem priests until recently.
"It's not ancient history, it's very, very recent," [David] Clohessy said, [national director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP].
In the late 1960s, the Rev. Robert V. Meffan allegedly recruited girls to become nuns and then sexually abused them, according to 1993 letters from Sister Catherine E. Mulkerrin to her boss, the Rev. John B. McCormack, who was a top aide to Law. Meffan allegedly would counsel the girls to perform sexual acts as a way of progressing with their religious studies.
Meffan allegedly engaged in sexual acts with four girls in a Cape Cod rental, one of the girls told Mulkerrin, according to the 1993 memo.
"They were all young girls planning to be nuns," said attorney Roderick MacLeish Jr., who represents 247 plaintiffs suing the archdiocese.
Meffan told The Boston Globe the allegations in the documents were true, and that he still believed his sexual relationships with the teenage girls were "beautiful" and "spiritual," and were intended to bring them closer to God.
"What I was trying to show them is that Christ is human, and you should love him as a human being," said Meffan. "I felt that by having this little bit of intimacy with them that this is what it would be like with Christ."
Daniela knows about temptation: every time she walks out onstage in a bathing suit, men take notice. But she doesn’t see a contradiction in her double life as virgin and beauty queen; rather, it’s a personal challenge. “I did Hawaiian Tropic because I wanted to see if I could get into a bikini in front of all these people,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to win.’ But I did, and I got a free trip to Houston’s state finals. I met the owner of Hawaiian Tropic. It’s like, wow, this is as good as it gets.”
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (Rom. 1:20)
In conclusion, science in general and the big bang theory in particular rely on all manner of unprovable assumptions. That is, upon faith. Just like the creationists' beliefs do. The major difference is that the creationists acknowledge their faith.
'The nudity is meant to show an unconventional attitude that communicates style and confidence,' said Brad Horowitz, VP of marketing at Clarins Fragrance Groups, which distributes the fragrance. 'This man is a little daring but he's not taking himself that seriously. It's an amusing nakedness.'
“We do not feel oppressed,” said Eboni Leake, a former U of M student who converted to Islam during her junior year. “We wear the hijab for modesty, and to be respected for who we are. The guys don’t talk in a way that would demean women when I’m around anymore, and if they do, they apologize.”
I used to think that if my kids attended Sunday school, memorized enough verses, and sat up straight and tall during family devotions, we would produce in them extraordinary faith.
It is impossible for me to live's Christ's life, nor can I meaningfully imagine Jesus leading my life . At best, I can hope to live a Christly life. But that makes the question not, WWJD, but "WWJHMD" - what would Jesus have me do?
| "Sin is incurable by the strength of man, nor does free will have any validity here,
so that even the saints say: 'The evil which I do not wish, this I do.' 'You are not doing the things which you wish.' 'Since my loins are filled with illusions,' etc." |
| You are Martin Luther! Yeah, you have a way of letting everyone know how you feel, usually with Bible quotes attached, and will think your way through the issues, although sometimes you make no sense! You aren't always sure of yourself, and you can change your mind about things, something you actually consider a strength. You can take solitude, especially with some music. |
Someone asks: how would you teach morality to someone who doesn't believe in God or the hereafter? She replies that religion is not necessary to teaching morality. "The way children are taught to love, honor, respect--and sometimes fear--God, they also can be taught to love, honor, respect and fear mankind itself. Such teachings would guide human behavior: Any reasonable adult who desired the approval of his fellow man and woman would be motivated to do the right thing."
[Edmund] Burke would have recognized such nonsense as the revolutionary foundation of tyranny. Followers of such a moral code as she describes all too frequently trample individual men and women while acting out of love for mankind as a whole.
Open theists emphasize God's self-limitation in dealing with humans. Because God desires people's free response, openness theologians say, he neither predetermines nor foreknows their moral choices. In the Bible, they say, God changes his mind, or "repents," in response to human actions.
The LORD said to Moses, 'I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people. Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you (i.e., Moses) a great nation.' --Exodus 32:9-10, NASB-u
As an expert on the New Testament, Witherington is used to being quoted in Christianity Today and other national publications.
But he's never experienced anything like the media buzz surrounding this story.
"They're calling from anywhere," Witherington said recently. "You've got a media out there that is basically biblically illiterate, so they're desperate to get some handholds on what the significance of this is."
Angry mobs in the mainly-Muslim city 600 kilometres (375 miles) northwest of Lagos burnt Christian churches and rampaged through the streets stabbing, bludgeoning and burning bystanders to death....
Schools and shops hurriedly closed as hordes of young men, shouting "Allahu Akhbar," or "God is great," ignited makeshift street barricades made of tires and garbage, sending plumes of black smoke rising above the city. Others were heard chanting, "Down with beauty" and "Miss World is sin."
"Most of the church people who fight about their musical preference do so because they don't understand the relationship between music, communication, God and worship. Church leaders foster the problem by focusing on how to please people with music or how to offer enough styles of music to meet everyone's tastes rather dealing with the underlying issues of limited interest in, comprehension of, and investment in fervent worship of a holy, deserving God."
''Despite what the PTC [Parents Television Council] says, this is not pornography,'' CBS spokesman Chris Ender said. ''It's a one-hour fashion show mixed with musical performances and comedy segments.
[T]o whom or what do Christian pledge their allegiance? In reading and hearing what some of my brethren are saying, I get the impression that they have pledged at least part of their allegiance to someone or something other than Christ.
The myth of an Islamic Golden Age is needed by Islam’s apologists to save it from being damned by its present squalid condition; to prove, as it were, that there is more to Islam than the terrorism of Bin Laden and the decadence of the oil sheiks. It is, frankly, a confession that if the world judges it by what it is today, it comes up rather short, being a religion that has yet to produce a democratic or prosperous society, or social and cultural forms admired by neutral foreign observers the way anyone can admire American freedom, Japanese order, Israeli courage, or Italian style.
