Excuse me for not having written of late. Been busy working on the new book…More on that later.

Here’s a story you might have missed:

Kirstie Alley was the (as it turns out) short-term spokesperson for Jenny Craig. Unlike Valerie Bertinelli who continues to hawk for the weight-loss company, Kirsty Allen couldn’t keep the weight off.

Willing to try yet again, Ms. Alley created her own line of weight loss products and developed a reality show–Kirstie Alley’s Big Life–on A&E to launch them. (The show still appears on A&E’s web site, but it is not currently on their program schedule.)

When I tell you that this show is beyond bad (one critic’s headline was something along the lines of “Big Life has the makings of a Big Flop”), you know that’s saying something because I’ll watch a lot of programming others consider fairly awful. Suffice it to say, I couldn’t make it through more than one episode.

What does this have to do with religion and marketing? According to an article on Gawker, the line of diet products being sold have ties to the preachings of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. (Alley is well known as a Scientologist.) Anonymous, a group that is famous for investigating Scientology, claims that there are ties to the church itself, though that has not been verified.

Either way, it would behoove those who are concerned about their weight and fans of Kirstie Alley to not go blindly into purchasing this product–one that has a steep price tag of $139/month…wonder how that compares with Jenny Craig?

There was a wonderful story in the NY Times yesterday about one man’s response to the overcommercialization of yoga.

In a world where who your yoga teacher is and whether you are wearing Lululemon has become more important than your connection to Spirit, Greg Gumucio has not bought into the hype. Instead he has created an anti-celebrity, anti-fashionista yoga in his studios called Yoga to the People. Students don’t know who their teacher will be when they take a class; they pay what they can afford to pay and as their website states: “There will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers … No ego no script no pedestals.”

To those who would suggest that it is impossible to balance faith and commerce, I would suggest taking a lesson from Mr. Gumucio. He has 3 studios in New York, 2 in California, has plans to expand into Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Chelsea as well as possible long-term expansion into Austin, Chicago and Los Angeles.

In the Kabbalah Centre’s neverending quest to spread the word, they have now launched Kabbalah U online. They say they are doing this because it is the most effective means to disseminate this information, which is of course try. However, if the goal was to make the information available, they would provide it all for free.

This, of course, is not the case…except for the next 5 days. Until April 30, you can use Kabbalah U for free.

To login, visit www.ukabbalah.com and enter the following:
username: april
password: april

Here you will find “hundreds of hours of classes from teachers all over the world, available for downloading & watching as much as you desire, learning new lessons each time you watch.”

Better hurry! After Friday, you have to pay $42/month!

I’ve never shopped at Forever 21 (truly, I’m not the target audience as you can see from the picture below), but I didn’t realize just how true that was until recently.

Students of mine are doing research on the value-priced clothing store Forever 21 and they told me something that was fairly shocking. On the bottom of all Forever 21 bags, it says “John 3:16″. I couldn’t believe it so I went to the store myself and asked for a bag. There is was!

I went online and evidently this has been going on for about 5 years (at least in the blogosphere). I also went to Forever 21’s website and while they do not promote their evangelicalism they do have a line of clothing for “extended sized” women called Faith 21.

I don’t know if this is suggesting that you need more faith when you are larger or if you need faith to help lose weight (something written about extensively here). In either case, it seems like an odd name for a brand extension.

I can only wonder how many Jews or atheists or Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims in NYC know about this evangelical connection when walk through the store on 14th Street….and what other “secular” retailers have an evangelical mission that we don’t know about.

…on kiva.org, that is.

I was at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference this weekend and Premal Shah, President of Kiva was one of the key note speakers.

For those of you who don’t know, Kiva is a microfinancing site that allows individuals to make loans (as small as $25) to people in (mostly) developing countries. (A current controversy the company is facing is their decision to support American workers as well as those in the so-called Third World.)

To increase the fun factor on the site, Kiva came up with the idea of creating teams so that groups of people could donate money and track their giving against other groups. The two teams that lead the pack are the “Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious” and the “Kiva Christians.” However, aethists have given close to $1.7 million while the Christians are just under one million dollars.

I find this very interesting, though I’m not sure exactly what it means. It could be that atheists are more internet savvy than their Christian brethren. It could mean that Christians are giving to their churches rather than Kiva. We don’t know. However, it does beg the question: since atheists don’t give to a religious institution (which is a substantial part of the donated money in the United States) where do atheists tend to donate…besides Kiva, of course?

Today Samuel Goldwyn is releasing To Save a Life, a Christian film about a teen coping with another teen’s suicide.

The filmmakers claim they produced the film because they realized that movies have the most influence on teens today. In addition, they are using new media to get teens to spread the word –dare we say evangelize?–about the film. To that end their website is very impressive. The number of tools they use is far to extensive to enumerate here so I suggest you check it out for yourself.

This campaign is a great example of the blending of sacred and secular; corporate and Christian. In fact, while we won’t know for a while whether it is successful, on its face it is simply a very good marketing teen-targeted campaign.

I find myself recently being bombarded with emails asking me to buy the latest book from Joel Osteen or the attend the latest weekend seminar from Saddleback. I can only assume that these institutions are feeling the effects of the recession just like everyone else.

What is particularly interesting, however, is the increase in marketing sophistication attached to these promotional missives. Most interesting is the promotion for Joel Osteen’s new book which you can see on his website. While one always has the option to purchase the book outright, consumers are also being offered the opportunity to purchase a limited edition of the book which is signed and number.

Since when have mass produced commodities been numbered like limited edition lithographs? Oh sure, we can get into a discussion about mass produced art, but we’re talking about books that are going to be produced in the millions. What’s the value here? Being the first to get a copy? Having it signed? Is there appreciative re-sale value?

In terms of the advertising itself, there’s the feel of a PBS pledge drive in the language. “Donate this amount you and you get the signed edition of the book and the DVD.” It leads the consumer to feel like s/he’s giving something away and not simply buying a book.

It’s smart marketing, for sure. Is it smart religion? Can we even call it religion? Well, that’s for another post.

The United Methodist Church has been running an advertising campaign recently called “Rethink Church.” (To view the commercial campaign, go to youtube)

The Web site for the campaign is not “Rethink Church” but rather 10thousanddoors.org. I find this particularly odd because it dilutes the branding of “Rethink Church,” a concept the UMC has been using for a while. Moreover if you type www.rethinkchurch.org, you will be re-routed to the UMC home page. (I thought, perhaps, they weren’t using this branding because someone was squatting on the “rethink church” name, but that’s not the case.)

The idea behind “Rethink Church” and “10 thousand doors” is to think of church beyond any preconceived notion and to imagine, instead, what it could be. The tagline on the 10,000 doors site, for example is “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors?” On the site there are doors you can click on to talk to others, there’s a door called Go/Do which answers the question: What do you do once you know you want to do something? and another that says “Find” which directs visitors to ways they can help others. The church, therefore, is about the world and not about any given building.

While I think the marketing is a bit confusing, the message is dead on. Volunteerism is up (okay, some of that is because people are out of work, but still), MBAs are taking oaths to “do good” in their jobs and there’s a White House office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Whether this is the “Obama Effect” or declining economic circumstances, it’s hard to say. Either way, it appears the UMC has tapped into what has traditionally been a strength of religious institutions–the ability to foster service–something many churches moved away from as they increasingly embraced a personal relationship with Jesus.

Technology and churches are still big news! The Sunday Times had a front page article called, “Our Father, Lead Us to Tweet, And Forgive the Trespassers.”

Months ago, I blogged about the Trinity Church tweeting the Stations of the Cross. I thought it was the only interesting use of the technology other than for PR folks. Turns out it had some glitches. See, the issue with Twitter is that it’s interactive, and people started tweeting back (and not things like “Amen.”) The church took it in stride and were at least pleased these interactors were paying attention.

This article is the latest in an evidently growing number of articles about religious institutions and technology. (See post below on CyberSynagague.) The uptick has occurred because these institutions are now having to deal with Web 2.0. Do we use Facebook? We’ve signed up for Twitter, but now what? (Which is what everyone else is say too, no?)

The difference for religious institutions broadly is that much of the benefit they provide, particularly these days, is community and fellowship–something that is in direct contradiction to the isolation of digital technology. Individual faiths also have specific issues, such as Muslims’ concerns with being watched by antiterrorist investigators and Catholics’ concerns with message control.

What has happened, though, is what happened with marketing–one by one, each group finds some way to use the technology to further their needs.

The cover story for the summer issue of Reform Judaism is called CyberSanctuary. It is about how Internet technology is being used within congregations and within reform institutions, i.e., Union for Reform Judaism.

It was interesting that the magazine gave this topic the cover. I say this because much of what was discussed in the piece didn’t seem particularly new. Rabbis mentioned that they had been using podcasts for three years and blogging for two–that doesn’t constitute “new news.” Other uses of the Internet included posting monthly bulletins and using emails for death notices. Congregations are also providing their services online so that people who can’t make it to the synagogue can participate virtually–something Christians have obviously been doing for quite some time.

A couple of new ideas were mentioned: web sites that help track b’nai mitzvah students’ progress, video conferencing and social networking. This last was useful primarily for engaging younger congregants. One thing I thought was interesting is students practicing their Torah portion and uploading to a site so their tutor could review it before their next lesson. This is an effective use of the technology to further religious study and not one I had seen before.

The article is worth a look for a few pieces of interesting information like the last one mentioned above. In addition, it contains several links so you can see what various institutions are up to.