*The talented sister team Tina and Erica Campbell (aka Mary Mary) have now merged as a literary duo with their new book “Be U!” In it they encourage readers to be their God intended best which entreats one to be honest, be beautiful, be intentional, be strong and be you!

The vocal power, fashion forward style and youthful appeal of Mary Mary added a freshness and a jolt to the gospel music industry when they quickly rose to fame in the year 2000. Although they were rooted and grounded in the church, their sound soon broke the traditional gospel mold and crossed over into pop and R&B.

In the book, Mary Mary glides through personal journeys that have waged tremendous victories in their lives. From growing up in a crowded low income home in Inglewood, California to escaping a house fire, a risky child birth, maintaining marriage and the challenges of parenthood; this talented twosome has endured it all with the grace of God and an unwavering faith that they credit to the strength of their dear mother.

Grammy award winners, Tina and Erica, trade personal stories interwoven by scriptures and passages of verses from their many hit song as a prelude to each chapter in Be U.

Tina emphatically shares a truth that took her many years to embrace:

“God made me just the way that I needed to be, where we are now is not where we always were, but everything that we started with before we became Mary Mary was just what we needed to make a great impact, to make our mark in the world to use our voice to help encourage and uplift someone to draw them closer to God and to help them be their best self!”

Tina shares how she and Erica hope to extend their mission beyond the book; “Through our Be U brand, we want to encourage you to be your best self, and your best self definitely ain’t goin’ under the knife to change what God made beautiful!”

Although Be U is an empowerment tool, it also renders space for reflection and personal growth through journaling. Tina expounds on this:

“When you reflect on who you are, how you are, where you are, what your perspectives are, what your strengths are, where your lack is, it is then that you’re able to write this down and reflect on that. This is when you can really see who you are and how you need to be.”

The sisters are involved in further outreach via the Mary Mary Foundation. They also continue to appear on BET’s Sunday Best and this fall look for the Be U Collection at Walmart! For more news, go to www.Mary-Mary.com

Want to take the gold medal at being yourself, click here for details on owning your own copy of Be U by Mary Mary. “Be U” is published by Howard Books, a division of Simon and Schuster.

Lutisha Lovely is definitely the Christian answer to Jackie Collins. She takes you on a journey of suspense, excitement and drama that is parallel to the night time soap operas that were all the rage in the 1980’s.

The saga begins with “Sex in the Sanctuary” where you meet Vivian Montgomery at the Kingdom Citizen’s Christian Center. You discover that as first lady Vivian has it all: a beautiful home, lovely children, and a pastor husband who makes her shout Hallelujah–and not just in church. There’s no doubt Pastor Montgomery has a healthy appreciation for the Lord and for the pleasures of the flesh, namely his wife’s flesh. If only Vivian’s best friend, Tai, another First lady was so blessed you meet the women on the precipice of friendship and marriage dilemmas of all sorts. You discover that one of the preacher’s has a secret that could tear friendship and lives apart.

In the second Book “Love Like Hallelujah” we return to the Kingdom Citizens and Mount Progressive congregations, with updates, and sometimes upsets, on the lascivious lives of some scandalous saints. You delve deeper into secrets and lies told in the first book and find out what has happened since last you visited. Both best friends always wanting to “have each other’s backs” results in a shocking turn of events. What they find out, however, is more than either of them ever wanted to know.

In the fourth installment “Heaven Right Here” we discover that the members of Kingdom Citizens Christian Center are well onto the next earth shattering truth when baby mama drama shakes up the saints, everyone better pray for mercy.

The fifth book “Reverend Feelgood” we follow through the doors to the visiting preacher we met at the end of Heaven Right Here. It leaves the timeless question of what determines a man of God when he is living less than Godly.

The Sixth book due this summer “Heaven Forbid” is promising to be a page turner as you will follow-up on Passion’s life situation. Will Passion finally understand that all that glitters is not Gold?

Ms. Lovely delivers on each page the right mix of sex, morality, faith and humor. You genuinely become interested in each character and want to know what happens next. If you need a page turner this should be the beginning of your summer reading list. All books are available on kindle.

Wyclef announced the creation of Yéle Corps, a new program that will provide jobs to nearly 1,000 people a day cleaning the streets and removing garbage. The program also includes a vocational training component. Nearly 1,000 people attended a Yéle Corps rally at the Place St. Pierre tent camp where Wyclef addressed the first 200 workers to be signed up for the program when it begins operation in the next month. Yéle has received major financial support for this new initiative from the “Hope for Haiti Now Fund,” with secondary support from the BET telethon “SOS Saving OurSelves.”

*Way back in 1844 in England, the Young Men’s Christian Association sounded snappy.

In 1967 the Y.M.C.A. sound even better.

Fast forwardm forty-three years later — in the age of texting, IHOP and KFC — and “the Y” just plain works better.

The bottom line is that the Chicago-based U.S. nonprofit isn’t trying to shed its Christian affiliation in announcing this week that it is changing its logo and name, officials said.

The switch comes after more than two years of research indicated many people don’t understand what the group does.

Officials with the Y say they hope the new logo will be more inviting. The group’s mission is to strengthen communities by focusing on youth development, healthy living and social responsibility.

An explosion of smart-phone software has placed an arsenal of trivia at the fingertips of every corner-bar debater, with talking points on sports, politics and how to kill a zombie. Now it is taking on the least trivial topic of all: God.

Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle.

“Say someone calls you narrow-minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God,” says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. “Your first answer should be: ‘What do you mean by narrow-minded?’ ”

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

The war of ideas between believers and nonbelievers has been part of the Western tradition at least since Socrates. For the most part, it has been waged by intellectual giants: Augustine, Spinoza, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.

Yet for good or ill, combatants entering the lists today are mainly everyday people, drawn in part by the popularity of books like Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great.” The fierceness of their debate reflects the fractious talk-show culture unintentionally described so aptly in the title of the Glenn Beck best seller “Arguing With Idiots.”

In a dozen new phone applications, whether faith-based or faith-bashing, the prospective debater is given a primer on the basic rules of engagement — how to parry the circular argument, the false dichotomy, the ad hominem attack, the straw man — and then coached on all the likely flashpoints of contention. Why Darwinism is scientifically sound, or not. The differences between intelligent design and creationism, and whether either theory has any merit. The proof that America was, or was not, founded on Christian principles.

Users can scroll from topic to topic to prepare themselves or, in the heat of a dispute, search for the point at hand — and the perfect retort.

Software creators on both sides say they are only trying to help others see the truth. But most applications focus less on scholarly exegesis than on scoring points.

One app, “Fast Facts, Challenges & Tactics” by LifeWay Christian Resources, suggests that in “reasoning with an unbeliever” it is sometimes effective to invoke the “anthropic principle,” which posits, more or less, that the world as we know it is mathematically too improbable to be an accident.

It offers an example: “The Bible’s 66 books were written over a span of 1,500 years by 40 different authors on three different continents who wrote in three different languages. Yet this diverse collection has a unified story line and no contradictions.”

“The Atheist Pocket Debater,” on the other hand, asserts that because miracles like Moses’ parting of the waters are not occurring in modern times, “it is unreasonable to accept that the events happened” at all. “If you take any miracle from the Bible,” it explains, “and tell your co-workers at your job that this recently happened to someone, you will undoubtedly be laughed at.”

These applications and others — like “One-Minute Answers to Skeptics” and “Answers for Catholics” — appear to be selling briskly, if nowhere near as fast as the top sellers among the so-called book apps in their iPhone category: ghost stories, free books and the King James Bible.

Sean McDowell, the editor of “Fast Facts” and some textbooks for Bible students, said he has become increasingly aware of a skill gap between believers and nonbelievers, who he feels tend to be instinctively more savvy at arguing. “Christians who believe, but cannot explain why they believe, become ‘Bible-thumpers’ who seem dogmatic and insecure about their convictions,” he said. “We have to deal with that.”

“Nowadays, atheists are coming to the forefront at every level of society — from the top of academia all the way down to the level of the average Joe,” added Mr. McDowell, a seminary Ph.D. candidate whose phone app was produced by the B&H Publishing Group, one of the country’s largest distributors of Bibles and religious textbooks.

Jason Hagen may be that average guy. A musician and a real estate investor who lives in Queens, Mr. Hagen decided to write the text for “The Atheist Pocket Debater” this year after buying his first iPhone and finding dozens of apps for religious people, but none for nonbelievers like himself.

In creating what became the digital equivalent of a 50,000-word tract, he gleaned material from the recent antifaith books and got the author Michel Shermer’s permission to reprint essays from Mr. Shermer’s monthly magazine, Skeptic. Mr. Hagen pitched his idea to Apple, which referred him to an independent programmer who helped him develop the application; the company pays Mr. Hagen 50 cents for each download of the $1.99 app. He said a few thousand had sold.

What inspired him, he said, was a lifetime of frustration as the son of a fundamentalist Christian preacher in rural Virginia.

“I know what people go through, growing up in the culture I grew up in,” said Mr. Hagen, 39, adding that his father had only recently learned of his true beliefs. “So I tried to give people the tools they need to defend themselves, but at the same time not ridicule anybody. Basically, the people on the other side of the debate are my parents.”

Still, some scholars consider that approach to the debate the least auspicious way of exploring the mystery of existence.

“It turns it into a game,” said Dr. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, in Manhattan. “Both sides come to the discussion with fixed ideas, and you have what amounts to a contest between different types of fundamentalism.”

Indeed, the new phone applications seem to promise hours of unrelieved, humorless argument.

“When someone says, ‘There is no truth,’ ” the Fast Facts app advises, “ask them: ‘Is that true? Is it true there is no truth?’ Because if it’s true that there is no truth, then it’s false that ‘there is no truth.’ ”

Mr. Hagen’s atheistic app resonates with the same certitude. If Jacob saw the face of God (in Genesis 32:30), and God said, “No man shall see me and live” (in Exodus 33:20), then “which one is the liar?” he asks.

His conclusion: “If we know the Bible has content that is false, how can we believe any of it?”

Unavailing as such exchanges may seem, they are a fact of life in parts of the country where for some people, taboos against voicing doubt have lifted for the first time.

“I don’t know that there’s more atheists in the country, but there are definitely more people who are openly atheist, especially on college campuses,” said the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and author of “Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists.” He said students have asked him how to deal with nonbelievers.

“There is not one student on this campus who doesn’t have at least one person in his circle of family and friends voicing these ideas,” he said.

If smart-phone software can improve the conversation, all to the good, he said. “The app store is our new public commons.”

Michael Beaty, chairman of the philosophy department at Baylor University, a Christian university in Waco, Tex., was not so sure.

“We’d be better off if these people were studying Nietzsche and Kant,” he said.

*Internationally renown gospel artist Fred Hammond has collaborated with philanthropist Roy Campbell, his business partner, under a distribution agreement with Universal Music Christian Group for a brand new project called “Life in the Word.”

The album will feature some of the world’s greatest gospel artists.

“We are honored that Fred Hammond chose UMCG as the place where he could develop and unfurl his vision,” said Rhoda Lawrence, Vice President of UMCG. “People are thirsty for music that tackles everyday issues in their lives and they want it delivered in a way that speaks to them. Fred Hammond has the talent and the vision to propel gospel music to new heights; appealing to and inspiring music fans of all age groups and walks of life. Fred is passionate about artistry and about his lifelong mission to transform people’s lives. When you have the opportunity to play a part in something of this magnitude, first you pinch yourself and then you get to work.”

This great project will be released for purchase July 27 of this year. The first single, “You Do Great Things” is the first great primer of the production.

“The opportunity to form my label couldn’t come at a better time,” said Hammond, President and CEO of fHammond Family Entertainment. “Out of the box thinking and creativity is what we are producing here. The projects that we have in development will further my artistic expression and expose my devoted music fans and beyond to another dimension of the Fred Hammond brand.”

Other great singles include “Dwelling Place,” a devotional song of praise, “Hiding Place” and “Need My Time With You.”

Atlanta, GA (BlackNews.com) — Dr. Alduan Tartt, an African American psychologist based in Atlanta, GA is going after Dr. Phil. “Dr Phil has revolutionized the way psychologists offer help to the general public by sharing his intellect through the media. Dr. Phil touches on so many different topics through his series of books and talk show, allowing him to impact millions who would never consider or could afford to visit an actual psychologist,” Tartt states.

And now, in an age where there are a host of media outlets to reach the masses, Dr. Tartt believes he has some new insight to offer on everything from relationship and family counseling, mental wellness and general health amongst the African American community. The Morehouse College and University of Michigan graduate, has decided to follow Dr. Phil’s strategic path to positively impact his community and beyond.

Dr. Tartt is using the media to empower the community on proven solutions to decrease rates of high school drop outs, teen pregnancy, gang violence and increase youths’ sense of purpose. In addition, he aims to help women marry by educating them on what men need from a spouse but don’t necessarily communicate. On July 31st, he is conducting a seminar that aims to teach single mothers how to raise young boys into becoming exceptional men, even without the presence of a father at home.

Dr. Tartt credits President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech as the primary inspiration to expand his practice. “I was listening to President Obama and initially began to celebrate when I suddenly realized that he was imploring me to work harder versus merely celebrate if I truly wanted to help save this country,” said Tartt. “So I said to myself, ‘what can I do to be part of the solution?’ I then decided to follow suit for my community by studying the ideologies of Dr. Phil because of his tremendous success in the field and respect amongst the public.”

Amidst his brainstorming and extensive research, Dr. Tartt collected all of the areas he felt he could add value in and pitched that knowledge to the media. His attempts to make a debut on television and introduce himself to the world happened within twelve months, when he appeared on ABC’s Nightline Special “Why Successful Black Women Can’t Find A Man” with Steve Harvey, Hill Harper and Sherri Shepherd, TV One’s Black Men Revealed as a relationship expert.

He has also been featured on MTV’s Made, Keith Sweat’s Platinum House of Hits as a celebrity life coach and Gospel Touch as a Christian Psychologist. He has been quoted in magazines like Essence, Black Enterprise and Heart & Soul. Dr. Tartt has also shared his ideologies in over 50 radio interviews on everything from relationship, marriage, parenting, career advice, psychology of starting a business and teaching teen girls how to successfully date boys without having sex. He is also author of his soon to be re-released book, The Ring Formula: How To Marry Mr. RIGHT.

Despite his growing success, Dr. Tartt is not stopping anytime soon and has a lot more projects in the works that he wants to give to the community. Recently, he has inked deals with Today’s Black Women Magazine as a monthly columnist, co-starring in Bullies, a reality show that reforms Bullies and their victims, working with recording artist Fantasia, being a featured speaker for Essence’s annual women’s conference in New York and developing a group mentoring model to serve more youth.

Although he credits a lot of his success to his idol Dr. Phil, Dr. Tartt wants to make no mistake that he attributes everything to his increasing relationship with God. “I prayed nightly and asked God to open my eyes to every opportunity he put in front of me and to allow me to touch the world in the ways He sees fit,” said Tartt. “I also hired an incredible woman named Libby Gill, who is the branding expert behind Dr. Phil’s meteoric assent.” He also credits Dante Lee, creator of BlackExperts.com, for encouraging him to expand his message to the world. He is offering a seminar on July 31, 2010 in Atlanta entitled, “Helping Single Moms to Raise Boys Into Exceptional Men”.

Visit www.drtartt.com for information. Dr. Tartt is open for media interviews – drtartt@drtartt.com or 404-377-4757

The Queen of Hip/Hop Soul was recently awarded an honorary diploma from Roosevelt High, her former high school in Yonkers, New York.

Now with her GED in hand, she’s set to become a student at Howard University as part of the upcoming class of 2014.

Mary made the official announcement during a performance on “Good Morning America” and told the audience the exciting news saying,

“As you know I never got a chance to finish high school but they gave me my honorary degree the other day….and I’ve been accepted into Howard University, the class of 2014!”

Check out the video here

“We need to start getting into people’s business. We need to say, ‘Hey, I’m your cousin man, I’m your brother, I’m your sister and I don’t care if you don’t talk to me anymore but your teenage daughter ain’t got no business dressing like that!’ Tell them.”

Makes sense to me. We used to have a community, but the black community has been destroyed and dismantled for various reasons. The days of beating one another’s kids, sharing sugar, bread or an egg are gone. We can’t speak freely about the problems we see with our children for fear someone is going to get an attitude. He’s right on so many points and deserves a standing ovation for merely showing the courage to say it.

Here’s another gem Bossip.com printed from his speech:

“He then told the story of how a woman asked her son one day where he had been. “The boy said ‘uh, uh, no where.’ She asked him again, where he’d been. Again, he said, ‘uh, uh, no where. I ain’t doing nothing.’ She said, boy, where you been? Finally, he told her he was on the corner, hanging out.

“The woman looked at him and told him, ‘If you’re not in the picture, you can’t be framed.”

Read more from his speech here. The moment his speech is available on video, we promise to put it up for you. And as one of our readers suggested, we’ll print the transcript along with it …if it’s available. Enjoy.

Described as a “gripping, Biblical account of Saul and David” that is “brought to life with a modern retelling of the classic story,” Haddon stars as Dwight Hawkins, a man struggling to overcome the backlash of his peers and seeking to find his life’s purpose.

“You know I’m a pastor now, so I’m doing more studying than I’ve ever done in my life. I was studying the story of Saul and David and the dynamics within their relationship. This movie just opened up to me,” Haddon told BV Buzz, about his inspiration for the film.

‘Blessed & Cursed’ also stars actors Sheryl Lee Ralph (’Moesha’) and Drew Sidora (’Step It Up’), as well as gospel singers Kierra Sheard, Karen Clark Sheard, Dr. Bobby Jones, J. Moss, Damita Haddon, Jorel Quinn of 21:03 and Rance Allen.

“I hope that people walk away with a sense of purpose, a sense of pride in the church,” expressed Haddon. “There are so many different scenarios and relationships in the film that touches people right where they are.”

Shot in the 36-year-old singer’s hometown of Detroit, the movie will be released on DVD on June 15.

Haddon already has a follow-up feature to ‘Blessed & Cursed’ in the works.

Production on his second film ‘Gospel Street’ begins in June.

“It’s going to be like what ‘Krush Groove’ was to hip hop,” he declared, before adding: “I already have like 10 films in the works.”