Hello and thank you for your feedback regarding Hyundai advertising.

Hyundai Motor America would like to thank you and other consumers for sharing concerns about a new ad titled “Wedding” which aired during the opening games of the FIFA World Cup broadcast last week. We take comments of this nature very seriously. Because of feedback like yours, we have removed the ad from all Hyundai communications and stopped airing it.

We credit the passionate World Cup viewers and Hyundai owners for raising this issue to us. The unexpected response created by the ad, which combined both soccer and religious motifs to speak to the passion of international soccer fans, prompted us to take a more critical and informed look at the spot. Though unintentional, we now see it was insensitive. We appreciate your feedback and hope you will accept our sincere apologies.

With appreciation,

Hyundai Motor America

 Customer (Tony Dingess)

06/16/2010 12:25 AM

I am writing to inform your mockery of the Christian Mass was the most
disturbing piece of advertising I have ever seen in my life, and not only
will I never remotely consider purchasing one of your products I will
zealously encourage others to avoid you like the plague. I suggest that you
try a piece of that kind of advertising on the world of Islam and see how
Hama and Hezbollah members react to it. Maybe you can put the soccer ball in
Mecca and have 100,000 Muslim faithful making a pilgrimage around it, or
have it in front of several thousand Iranian Shiites as they bow down at the
hour of prayer, oh yeah that’s right you will only mock Christians because
you think they are less likely to bomb one of your production plants. Sounds
about right.

Sincerely,
Tony Dingess
Revelation Mountain Outfitters
1 B Perry Lane

Pecks Mill, WV 25547
304-239-0570

Thank you for contacting Hyundai Motor America.

Your email has been forwarded to our Consumer Affairs team for review and follow-up.

Hyundai Consumer Affairs ]]> http://the-revivalist.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=443 0 http://the-revivalist.com/blog/?p=442 http://the-revivalist.com/blog/?p=442#comments Sun, 02 May 2010 13:21:58 +0000 JosephRossHansen http://the-revivalist.com/blog/?p=442 JUBA, Sudan

Maybe the Catholic Church should be turned upside down.

Jesus wasn’t known for pontificating from palaces, covering up scandals, or issuing Paleolithic edicts on social issues. Does anyone think he would have protected clergymen who raped children?

Yet if the top of the church has strayed from its roots, much of its base is still deeply inspiring. I came here to impoverished southern Sudan to write about Sudanese problems, not the Catholic Church’s. Yet once again, I am awed that so many of the selfless people serving the world’s neediest are lowly nuns and priests — notable not for the grandeur of their vestments but for the grandness of their compassion.

As I’ve noted before, there seem to be two Catholic Churches, the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity in places like Sudan. The Vatican certainly supports many charitable efforts, and some bishops and cardinals are exemplary, but overwhelmingly it’s at the grass roots that I find the great soul of the Catholic Church.

The Vatican believes that this newspaper and other news organizations have been unfair and overzealous in excavating the church’s cover-ups of child rape. I see the opposite. No organization has done more to elevate the moral stature of the Catholic Church in the United States than The Boston Globe. Its groundbreaking 2002 coverage of abuse by priests led to reforms and by most accounts a significant reduction in abuse. Catholic kids are safer today not because of the cardinals’ leadership, but because of The Boston Globe’s.

Yet the church leaders are right about one thing: there is often a liberal and secular snobbishness toward the church as a whole — and that is unfair.

It may be easy at a New York cocktail party to sniff derisively at a church whose apex is male chauvinist, homophobic and so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS. But what about Father Michael Barton, a Catholic priest from Indianapolis? I met Father Michael in the remote village of Nyamlell, 150 miles from any paved road here in southern Sudan. He runs four schools for children who would otherwise go without an education, and his graduates score at the top of statewide examinations.

Father Michael came to southern Sudan in 1978 and chatters fluently in Dinka and other local languages. To keep his schools alive, he persevered through civil war, imprisonment and beatings, and a smorgasbord of disease. “It’s very normal to have malaria,” he said. “Intestinal parasites — that’s just normal.”

Father Michael may be the worst-dressed priest I’ve ever seen — and the noblest.

Anybody scorn him? Anybody think he’s a self-righteous hypocrite?

On the contrary, he would make a great pope.

In the city of Juba, I met Cathy Arata, a nun from New Jersey who spent years working with battered women in Appalachia. Then she moved to El Salvador during the brutal civil war there, putting her life on the line to protect peasants. Two years ago, she came here on behalf of a terrific Catholic project called Solidarity With Southern Sudan.

Sister Cathy and the others in the project have trained 600 schoolteachers. They are fighting hunger not with handouts but with help for villagers to improve agricultural techniques. They are also establishing a school for health workers, with a special focus on midwifery to reduce deaths in childbirth.

At the hospital attached to that school, the surgeon is a nun from Italy. The other doctor is a 72-year-old nun from Rhode Island. Nuns rock.

Sister Cathy would like to see more decentralization in the church, a greater role for women, and more emphasis on public service. She says she worries sometimes that if Jesus returned he would say, “Oh, they got it all wrong!”

She would make a great pope, too.

There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia. Now Father Mario lives side by side with his Congolese congregants in the squalor of a refugee camp in southern Sudan, struggling to get schooling for their children.

It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church. I understand why many Americans disdain a church whose leaders are linked to cover-ups and antediluvian stances on women, gays and condoms — but the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican.

And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church.

The priest/pedophile scandal is a horror. No question. It has been horribly mishandled. But neither has the Chuch condoned and held up as example people who sin, and openly proclaim it as acceptable behavior.

Every day, I am awakened with a song.  Some days it is a sweet hymn.  Other days it is my “thought” for the day set to music

On occasion, there is no music, only a phrase or something to chew on for a while….and I will admit, I have been chewing on a few things for a long time.  (Abba knows I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed).

Today……it was “Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads.   This song finds it’s way into my spirit from time to time, but today it’s a little different…. in what way I cannot describe…yet.

And I wait for the fire Father!