New Company Formed to Produce Interactive Fun-to-Play Christian Games Digital Praise Inc. to Encourage Positive Values Through Top-Quality Gaming Titles Without Violence, Sex, Hate or Horror

New Company Formed to Produce Interactive Fun-to-Play Christian Games

Digital Praise Inc. to Encourage Positive Values Through Top-Quality Gaming Titles Without Violence, Sex, Hate or Horror











Fremont, CA (PRWEB) June 26, 2004

Christian entertainment takes a step forward today with the formal announcement of Digital Praise Inc., a new company formed to produce high-quality interactive Christian games. Digital Praise is committed to releasing fun, exciting game titles that promote virtues and family values like forgiveness, tolerance and kindness, rather than the violent and sexual behavior that is the mainstay of most popular computer games today. Privately held by company founders, Digital Praise is located in Fremont, CA.

Â?Digital Praise is founded on the principle that fun, exciting computer games donÂ?t need to be flooded with violence, sex, hate or images of horror,Â? said Tom Bean, president and CEO of Digital Praise. Â?Our goal is to produce top-quality gaming titles that promote positive values while providing hours of exciting game play that will keep players coming back for more.Â?

Digital Praise is actively involved in the development of titles for release under its own brand and for third parties. The company is currently working on a series of interactive games based on Focus on the Family�s world-renowned Adventures in Odyssey® radio program. Digital Praise has secured the electronic rights for this popular radio series that has aired for 18 years and boasts over 1.2 million listeners each day. Digital Praise announced its agreement with Focus on the Family in a separate joint release today. The company expects to announce the first two Adventures in Odyssey computer game titles next week at the Christian Booksellers Association International 2004 convention. In addition, Digital Praise has completed Hamtaro: Wake Up Snoozer!, its first third-party development project for Riverdeep � The Learning Company.

Digital Praise has assembled a high-powered team of computer gaming industry veterans who among them have released over 20 popular game titles including perennial favorites Carmen Sandiego, Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail. CTO Peter Fokos, himself a 22-year veteran of the entertainment software industry with such industry giants as The Learning Company and Disney Interactive, said of the companyÂ?s engineering team, Â?WeÂ?ve pulled together a group of developers, producers, artists and audio engineers as fine as any IÂ?ve ever worked with. This is the kind of group that will keep producing award-winning titles and best sellers.Â?

Christian Games: Market Opportunity

An enormous appetite exists for Christian entertainment in various forms. The recent success of Christian music, books, movies, television and art is a testament to the importance of Christian content in all media. There is also strong growth in the U.S. entertainment software industryÂ? sales jumped 8% in 2003 to $ 7 billion1. Recognizing growth in both the Christian entertainment and the software entertainment markets, Digital Praise predicts healthy demand in the emerging interactive Christian games market.

Â?We see a tremendous opportunity in the interactive Christian games market, an industry estimated between $ 100 and $ 200 million in annual sales,Â? said Bill Bean, vice president of sales and marketing. Â?As long as new game titles are top qualityÂ?offering exciting game play and high production valueÂ?we believe that interactive Christian games will skyrocket in popularity much like Christian music did 15 years ago.Â?

Digital Praise is a pioneer in the emerging interactive Christian games industry, joining companies like Big Idea, NÂ?Lightning, and others in the effort to prove that violence, horror and hatred are not necessary components of exciting, fun game play.

Â?NÂ?Lightning products have received enormous praise from all parts of the world for their challenging play, innovative stories, and overall creative qualityÂ?proving that Christian titles can have you on the edge of your seat,Â? said Ralph Bagley, CEO of NÂ?Lightning Software Development, whose Christian action games have sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. He added, Â?Families, in increasing numbers, are saying no to entertainment products that undermine the values they consider essential. In the years to come, the current vanguard of Christian computer game publishers is certain to emerge as an important voice in the entertainment software industry.Â?

About Digital Praise Inc.

Digital Praise (http://www.digitalpraise.com) is an independent developer and publisher of interactive Christian games for kids, teens, adults and parents. The company produces games that are designed for families looking to enjoy interactive entertainment software that promotes virtues and family values like cooperation, forgiveness, tolerance and kindness, without the violence, hatred, horror and sex that fills computer gaming today. The companyÂ?s goal is to equivocate the Digital Praise brand with Â?just good clean fun.Â? Focus on the Family has granted Digital Praise the rights to publish interactive games based on its world-renowned radio program, Adventures in Odyssey. The company is located in Fremont, CA.

1 Â? Entertainment Software Association.

Digital Praise is a trademark of Digital Praise Inc. Adventures in Odyssey is a registered trademark of Focus on the Family. All other trademarks and trade names are hereby recognized and may be registered to their respective owners.

Press Contacts:                                                            

Patrick Crisp, Velocity Public Relations             

415-285-0661                    

patrick@digitalpraise.com

Bill Bean, Digital Praise    

510-770-0244

bill@digitalpraise.com

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President Obama, a Christian formed in the American Black church

Considered a man of faith, Barack Obama, the American President of the United States, is formed as a Christian. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), Chicago, where the Obama’s worshiped for 20 years in Illinois is his Obama’s former minister. What kind of Christian was the Church? The church website proclaims: “We are a congregation which is unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian…”

Trinity United Church of Christ occupies a tan brick building on West 95th Street across railroad tracks from a public housing project, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

The President said about leaving, “Too much press harassment, people couldn’t’ worship in peace.” That wasn’t his reason for leaving, but a complaint on the news media attention. The reasons were politically controversial remarks by Trinity’s pastor, Reverend Wright.

Wright’s comments contradicted one of Obama’s central messages — that the candidate can transcend past divisions such as those involving race.

Regarding the Church, on Bill Moyers Journal, Wright says we are unashamedly Black. His philosophy embodies, “Use the culture of which we are a part.” He preaches there is hope, that life has meaning, and that God is still in control. “We can change. We can do better.” Black Liberation theology is Wright’s United Church of Christ (UCC) message. It is a UCC message he offers, since he is a UCC minister who studied under Martin Marty. Martin E. Marty, distinguished Lutheran Pastor, teacher, and writer who has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 1963.

Grounded in the history of the African-American, Black theology is powerful stuff. He is little sorry about his comments, but in Bill Moyer’s interview, Reverend Wright does appear sorry he made the comment “God damn America” in the Pulpit-if only for a few moments. But it wasn’t one remark, but a string of them that caused the significant distancing between the candidate’s spiritual advisor and then candidate.

The press in the United States spent a lot of time and space talking about President Obama’s faith during the campaign, his church, and how he is a Christian-the President said he is Christian himself, and that is also news. Religion makes news, despite separation of Church and State. Time magazine says more voters saw President Obama as a strongly religious person than they did every major presidential hopeful during the campaign but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts. Romney’s Mormonism drew extensive news coverage.

President Obama was married in Trinity church. His children were baptized in the church, and also like his wedding, Reverend Wright performed the solemnizations. The President said on leaving the church, “Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized. We have many friends among the 8,000 members…” It is a church where he was moved many times. When Wright preached one Sunday about the sustaining power of hope in the face of poverty and despair, Obama says he found himself in tears.

He said in one speech during the Presidential campaign:

* “For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change… Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.”

It is the claim of Reverend Jeremiah Wright that Trinity is a church of Black theology. The Reverend Doctor John Cone, the Harvard Professor and African-American theologian interviewed on American Public Broadcasting System (PBS) by commentator Bill Moyers says on the PBS website:

* “As we examine what contemporary theologians are saying, we find that they are silent about the enslaved condition of black people. Evidently they see no relationship between black slavery and the Christian gospel. Consequently there has been no sharp confrontation of the gospel with white racism. There is, then, a desperate need for a black theology, a theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression.”

Cone says:

* The Cross is the same as the lynching tree for the Black American in a Harvard Speech. The Christian Reverend Cone wants to start a conversation on this subject. He offers that lynching was terrorism that “worked to a certain degree.” This includes spectacle lynchings where 5,000 would gather to watch.

Religion is one place where you have an imagination that no one can control.” Black Churches are a place of the spirit… (even though you are living under the shadow of the lynching tree).” … There were 246 years of slavery, and 100 years of segregation and lynching.   America does not see itself as “not innocent,” according to Cone. “No human being is innocent.”  

Reverend Cone is ordained in the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. which is one of the city’s largest black churches and not far from Obama’s home in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park.

Apparently the President did not turning his back on Black theology yet, per se, since he spoke from the pulpit at that same mega-church in Chicago, which has 20,000 members and is also considered a Black American church. This in 2008.

It is the history of the African American church in the United States that it is a center of Black community life speaking to the needs of the church and larger community in social and political ways. But not in so partisan a manner as was recently ascribed to the theology and preaching of the Reverend Wright. So the perception became. But he still associates himself with the African American church in general.

President Obama spoke of the role of Black fathers and their responsibilities, perhaps more a campaign speech than sermon from a “religious” man whose campaign motto is “Change That Works for You.” Will he again become a member of a Black Church while serving in Washington, D.C. Time will tell. Nonetheless, there his Christian roots lie.

It is from the Black Church that President Obama learned many things about hope. Can he really take himself out of the African-American church ethos, as he has known it? Perhaps the Reverend Wright thinks not, though he is not saying. His official press release remark on then President Obama and his family’s leaving was, “…We are saddened by the news …”

 

 

Peter Menkin, an aspiring poet, lives in Mill Valley, CA USA (north of San Francisco).

My blog:
http://www.petermenkin.blogspot.com

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