Word: bakker
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...Gucci briefcase, cosmetic surgery and a water slide have to do with spreading the Gospel? Nothing, the Internal Revenue Service ruled in effect last week as it revoked the tax-exempt status of PTL, the television ministry that supported the high living of Jim and Tammy Bakker. The IRS declared that PTL's business activities, including an amusement park, shopping malls and hotels as well as excessive payments to the Bakkers, served no ministerial purpose...
...looked at the moral scandals surrounding Ivan Boesky, Oliver North and Jim Bakker, and told us there is "a national preoccupation" surrounding ethics--one that will soon bring universities "under scrutiny." He treated the reader to a three-page history of moral instruction in this country. He charted his own "viable program of moral education...
...week prescribed precisely that punishment for him, Swaggart defied the decision and declared his intention to renew preaching next month. He thus not only raised questions about his own future but once again trained an unwanted spotlight on the church group that, before the scandals involving Swaggart and Jim Bakker, had become the fastest-growing denomination...
...many of Swaggart's followers, though, the larger concern is what harm the past year of Gospelgate will do to his remarkable denomination. "We are ready to put this matter behind us," states the group's weary leader, G. Raymond Carlson. Understandably so. The double-barreled embarrassment involving Bakker and Swaggart, the Assemblies' two most visible evangelists, has unforgettably tarnished preparations for the denomination's 75th anniversary next year. But so far the damage has been controllable, testimony to the extraordinary vigor of the Assemblies...
...brought low by carnal temptation. The image may seem to leap from today's headlines, but Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are only the latest in a long line that stretches back to the fictional Arthur Dimmesdale, yearning for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. After such falls from grace are revealed, the question always arises: Were the sinners truly devout souls brought to perdition or fiendish fakers from the start? That is precisely the issue raised by American literature's most exuberant portrait of religious hysteria and hypocrisy, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 Elmer Gantry...