“I don’t know you very well, and I am not a bull----er. I get [that] you don’t like the album. You’re 80; you’re not supposed to like my album.”
—pop singer Kelly Clarkson’s words to Clive Davis, legendary head of RCA, the record label the former American Idol champ is signed to; Davis rejected Clarkson’s new album full of songs she wrote herself, My December, saying it wouldn’t sell more than 600,000 copies (Clarkson to date has sold more than 19 million albums for Davis). Added Clarkson: “I got lied to. One reason I don't like working with people at the label is that they lie...If you’re going with the flow and not fighting, that’s settling. I can’t take that. Life is just too short to be a pushover.” Clarkson also fired her manager and cancelled her summer tour because of slack ticket sales.
source: New York Post, July 12

“Her only f--king credit was Survivor. Come on!...I can’t fight with pregnant people. Just go have your baby and have a nice life.””
—in front of a 1,500-person audience on her cruise (from New York City to a private island in the Bahamas) for gay and lesbian families, comedian/embattled talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell reflects on the dust-up she had with former friend and conservative colleague, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, on The View; apparently O’Donnell set up a huge photo of Hasselbeck doctored up as the devil.
source: US Magazine, July 11

‘Today no one is a virgin when they get married...show me someone who’s a virgin!”
—Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, in an interview with a San Paulo, Brazil, newspaper regarding the Roman Catholic Church’s influence in her native country on issues such as birth control and sexuality. Bundchen said the church’s opposition to condom use was ridiculous and women should have the right to choose abortion. The debate has intensified in the world's largest Roman Catholic country since the visit last May by Pope Benedict, who stressed the church's firm opposition to abortion and contraception and railed against sex outside of marriage.
source: Reuters, June 6

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us. At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design...I don't know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version.”
—presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), in an address to the national meeting of the United Church of Christ, the denomination he joined when he embraced Christianity at age 26; he added, “My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won't be fulfilling God's will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.”
source: Associated Press, June 23

“I do not believe that we are witnessing a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Christianity and Islam. But it is a fantasy to imagine that the world’s two largest faiths are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically close the divide between them. Even Shia and Sunni Islam are in many respects quite distinct—a fact American officials might have learned before things in Iraq went awry [and] if our public schools had not been treating this subject as taboo for generations.”
—Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University’s Department of Religion and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t
source: Newsweek, July 2-9

“To say that Jesus is a Savior can sometimes translate as, ‘Unless people know doctrine, they’re not going to be saved.’ I don’t believe that. I believe God loves everybody. And at the end of the day every creation of God goes on to God and his love equally. So I have difficulties with the implication that because somebody on the other side of the world doesn’t know Jesus, they don’t get saved...If you call it Allah or you call it God or you call it Buddha, it’s all the same. I think God saves everybody whether they want to be saved or not. So when we die, we’re all going home.”
—singer Sinead O’Connor, who has reportedly been embracing Christianity of late and just released a double CD, Theology, consisting of songs based on Old Testament writings
source: ChristianMusicToday.com, July 9