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Eve Gets Naked in Church
What to do if you're a church youth group leader and need some money? Make an erotic calendar of course. That's what Stefan Wiest did in Germany. Not surprisingly, some have called his taste into question. Nudes posing in church, they feel, is going a bit too far.

...In April, the youth group of the Lutheran congregation of Katzwang decided to come up with a fundraiser; the youth center rooms needed a new coat of paint. Somebody thought of making a calendar, one that could be sold in the community. The members of the youth group would be the models, depicting scenes from the Bible, but in a modern interpretation. Oh, and the calendar should be erotic, too. Why not, after all?

Nude photos it was.

The concept was nothing new. Last year the Franconian country youth group had put together something similar -- sitting on tractors in revealing dirndls. Students posed nude for photos and there were already calendars of nude volleyball players, soccer players and firemen. And then there was the film "Calendar Girls," so why not Marina, Julia and Michael from Katzwang?

They wanted to do everything properly: parents were informed, the pastor was asked to suggest suitable excerpts from the bible. Everyone under 18 needed written permission from their parents. A few members of the church board felt that showing naked women in the church was offensive, but they were clearly in the minority.

And so they took a few photographs: King David, who secretly watched a woman bathing, is depicted as a peeping tom in the sauna. The whore Rahab, waits in the door of a motel room, wearing only lingerie, Salome wears a thong and instead of her biblical seven veils, her body is covered in paint.

"It turned out really beautiful" says the Russian reporter in Wiest's sitting room.

An exhibition was planned for the second Sunday of Advent. Wiest told the local press and created a Web site. The young people thought about maybe advertising as well, otherwise nobody might come. The pastor talked to the evangelical press service and the church newspaper Sonntagsblatt. The next day he got a call from a Munich paper tz. "Why are you interested in our calendar?" he asked. He could hardly believe it. Why, Munich is 150 km away.

Soon thereafter, the Internet server crashed. ...