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.”
