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Frank Zappa – Black Napkins

Frank Zappa (December 21, 1940 December 4, 1993) was an American composer, electric guitarist, record producer, and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, electronic, orchestral, and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. Zappa produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. In his teens, he acquired a taste for percussion-based avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varèse and 1950s rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands—he later switched to electric guitar. He was a self-taught composer and performer, and his diverse musical influences led him to create music that was often impossible to categorize. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. His later albums shared this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was one of rock, jazz or classical. He wrote the lyrics to all his songs, which—often humorously—reflected his iconoclastic view of established social and political processes, structures and movements. He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Black Eyed Peas – Bebot Translated English Subs

CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES Article 14: Education, Science and Technology, Arts, Culture, and Sports Section 6: Language www.gov.ph en.wikipedia.org This is the translated version of Bebot by the Black Eyed Peas. This for those who are not able to understand Filipino/Tagalog
Video Rating: 4 / 5

“Police State” It’s been said the government has a plan to declare martial law and round up millions of United State citizens into concentration camps. Jesse may have found a conspiracy in plain sight as he investigates the proliferation of law enforcement Fusion Centers around the country. And they may be connected to hundreds of detention centers ready to accept prisoners at the stroke of a Presidential pen.

LifeWay’s Reconsider Explores the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Confronting the Black Church




Nashville, Tenn. (Vocus) March 20, 2010

The Black Church has traditionally been a loud voice for social change, though research conducted by LifeWay’s Marketing Research and reported in the current issue of Reconsider, a publication for leaders in today’s black churches, found that those churches have been curiously silent on the crisis of AIDS in the African-American community. Black church members say they need their churches to help stem the growing tide of new HIV and AIDS cases within the black community.

In this recent study to understand the needs of the Black Church, LifeWay found that 92 percent of black church members surveyed said they wanted their church to provide support to people dealing with socially stigmatized issues (i.e. HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, etc.) with a maximum amount of services (e.g. counseling, clinics, classes, etc.).

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the HIV/AIDS epidemic in African-American communities is a public health crisis in the United States. At the end of 2006, there were an estimated 1.1 million people living with HIV, of which almost half (46%) were African-American.

And while blacks represent approximately 12 percent of the U.S. population, they continue to account for a higher proportion of cases at all stages of HIV/AIDS—from infection with HIV to death with AIDS—compared with members of other races and ethnicities.

“In sharing these findings, we at LifeWay admit that we don’t have all the answers, but we share in the churches’ burden to react to the realities we see and to consider and determine tangible ways to respond,” said Elgia Wells, who directs LifeWay’s focus on the Black Church and serves as the pastor of a black church near Nashville, Tenn. “We hope these statistics cause pastors and leaders in black churches to work to determine specific ways to address these and other similar issues.”

LifeWay’s findings about the issue of HIV/AIDS in the Black Church are part of a broader set of findings from a larger survey among black churches across the United States. Study findings are the result of more than 60 qualitative interviews with church leaders, church members and unaffiliated persons and a quantitative survey with responses from approximately 780 individuals (196 church leaders, 315 church members and 272 unaffiliated persons) from across the U.S.

“Our research findings, which we are releasing through our new publication, Reconsider, give us a tool and a challenge to help churches evaluate the way they minister to different people and different situations in our communities,” said Wells.

About LifeWay’s Reconsider Campaign

Reconsider is a quarterly publication designed to help black churches evaluate the way they minister to different people and situations in today’s communities. To find more information on LifeWay’s Black Church research, or to learn about resources available to help churches address theses issues, visit www.lifeway.com/blackchurchlife.

About LifeWay Christian Resources

LifeWay Christian Resources, established in 1891 in Nashville, Tenn., is one of the world’s largest providers of Christian products and services, including Bibles, church literature, books, music, audio and video recordings, church supplies, and Internet services through LifeWay.com. The company owns and operates 154 LifeWay Christian Stores across the nation, as well as two of the largest Christian conference centers in the country. The company is a nonprofit organization that reinvests income above operating expenses in mission work and other ministries around the world. For additional information, visit www.lifeway.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Amy Gray, APR

Gray Public Relations

615.497.1799    

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Lewis Black on Politics and Religion


ME OF LITTLE FAITH by Lewis Black On sale June 3 from Riverhead Books

President Obama, a Christian formed in the American Black church

Considered a man of faith, Barack Obama, the American President of the United States, is formed as a Christian. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), Chicago, where the Obama’s worshiped for 20 years in Illinois is his Obama’s former minister. What kind of Christian was the Church? The church website proclaims: “We are a congregation which is unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian…”

Trinity United Church of Christ occupies a tan brick building on West 95th Street across railroad tracks from a public housing project, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

The President said about leaving, “Too much press harassment, people couldn’t’ worship in peace.” That wasn’t his reason for leaving, but a complaint on the news media attention. The reasons were politically controversial remarks by Trinity’s pastor, Reverend Wright.

Wright’s comments contradicted one of Obama’s central messages — that the candidate can transcend past divisions such as those involving race.

Regarding the Church, on Bill Moyers Journal, Wright says we are unashamedly Black. His philosophy embodies, “Use the culture of which we are a part.” He preaches there is hope, that life has meaning, and that God is still in control. “We can change. We can do better.” Black Liberation theology is Wright’s United Church of Christ (UCC) message. It is a UCC message he offers, since he is a UCC minister who studied under Martin Marty. Martin E. Marty, distinguished Lutheran Pastor, teacher, and writer who has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 1963.

Grounded in the history of the African-American, Black theology is powerful stuff. He is little sorry about his comments, but in Bill Moyer’s interview, Reverend Wright does appear sorry he made the comment “God damn America” in the Pulpit-if only for a few moments. But it wasn’t one remark, but a string of them that caused the significant distancing between the candidate’s spiritual advisor and then candidate.

The press in the United States spent a lot of time and space talking about President Obama’s faith during the campaign, his church, and how he is a Christian-the President said he is Christian himself, and that is also news. Religion makes news, despite separation of Church and State. Time magazine says more voters saw President Obama as a strongly religious person than they did every major presidential hopeful during the campaign but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts. Romney’s Mormonism drew extensive news coverage.

President Obama was married in Trinity church. His children were baptized in the church, and also like his wedding, Reverend Wright performed the solemnizations. The President said on leaving the church, “Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized. We have many friends among the 8,000 members…” It is a church where he was moved many times. When Wright preached one Sunday about the sustaining power of hope in the face of poverty and despair, Obama says he found himself in tears.

He said in one speech during the Presidential campaign:

* “For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change… Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.”

It is the claim of Reverend Jeremiah Wright that Trinity is a church of Black theology. The Reverend Doctor John Cone, the Harvard Professor and African-American theologian interviewed on American Public Broadcasting System (PBS) by commentator Bill Moyers says on the PBS website:

* “As we examine what contemporary theologians are saying, we find that they are silent about the enslaved condition of black people. Evidently they see no relationship between black slavery and the Christian gospel. Consequently there has been no sharp confrontation of the gospel with white racism. There is, then, a desperate need for a black theology, a theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression.”

Cone says:

* The Cross is the same as the lynching tree for the Black American in a Harvard Speech. The Christian Reverend Cone wants to start a conversation on this subject. He offers that lynching was terrorism that “worked to a certain degree.” This includes spectacle lynchings where 5,000 would gather to watch.

Religion is one place where you have an imagination that no one can control.” Black Churches are a place of the spirit… (even though you are living under the shadow of the lynching tree).” … There were 246 years of slavery, and 100 years of segregation and lynching.   America does not see itself as “not innocent,” according to Cone. “No human being is innocent.”  

Reverend Cone is ordained in the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. which is one of the city’s largest black churches and not far from Obama’s home in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park.

Apparently the President did not turning his back on Black theology yet, per se, since he spoke from the pulpit at that same mega-church in Chicago, which has 20,000 members and is also considered a Black American church. This in 2008.

It is the history of the African American church in the United States that it is a center of Black community life speaking to the needs of the church and larger community in social and political ways. But not in so partisan a manner as was recently ascribed to the theology and preaching of the Reverend Wright. So the perception became. But he still associates himself with the African American church in general.

President Obama spoke of the role of Black fathers and their responsibilities, perhaps more a campaign speech than sermon from a “religious” man whose campaign motto is “Change That Works for You.” Will he again become a member of a Black Church while serving in Washington, D.C. Time will tell. Nonetheless, there his Christian roots lie.

It is from the Black Church that President Obama learned many things about hope. Can he really take himself out of the African-American church ethos, as he has known it? Perhaps the Reverend Wright thinks not, though he is not saying. His official press release remark on then President Obama and his family’s leaving was, “…We are saddened by the news …”

 

 

Peter Menkin, an aspiring poet, lives in Mill Valley, CA USA (north of San Francisco).

My blog:
http://www.petermenkin.blogspot.com

[Black troops at the Memorial Day parade, Washington, D.C., probably Constitution Avenue] (LOC)

The Constitution
Image taken on 1940-01-01 00:00:00 by The Library of Congress.