This week our prayer focus is...
Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie, known as Madonna, is an American recording artist and entertainer. Born in Bay City, Michigan and raised in Rochester Hills, Michigan, Madonna moved to New York City for a career in modern dance. After performing as member of the pop musical groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her self-titled debut album in 1983, and then produced three consecutive number-one studio albums on the Billboard 200 in the 1980s and four more since year 2000.
Madonna is known for her works that explore religious symbolism and sexual themes which also drew criticism from the Vatican in the late 1980s. In 1992, she founded an entertainment company, Maverick, which published a book of photographs (Sex). She also released a studio album (Erotica) and starred in a film (Body of Evidence) with erotic themes. These works generated negative publicity and coincided with a fall in commercial sales in the 1990s. Madonna's career was revived in 1998, when the release of her album Ray of Light garnered critical acclaim.
There has been speculation about her relationships with other women, including Naomi Campbell and Sandra Bernhard. The book Sex depicts her in sexual situations with men and women, and she has been credited with educating people about bisexuality. In 1996 Madonna conceived a daughter, Lourdes Maria (also known as Lola) by personal trainer Carlos Leon before marrying film director Guy Ritchie in 2000. She and Ritchie have two sons, Rocco and David Banda, a Malawian boy they adopted in 2006, which caused media allegations they violated that country's adoption laws.
Madonna has acted in 22 films. Although many failed critically and commercially, she earned a Golden Globe Award for her role in the 1996 film Evita. Guinness World Records list her as the world's most successful female recording artist of all time and the top-earning female singer in the world with an estimated net worth of US $490 million, having sold over 200 million records worldwide. On March 10, 2008, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Since the late 1990s, Madonna has been a devotee of the Kabbalah Centre (Kabbalah is a Jewish form of mysticism) and a disciple of its head, Rabbi Philip Berg, and his wife Karen. She also studies with Rabbi Eitan Yardeni, whose wife Sarah Yardeni runs her favorite charitable project, "Spirituality for Kids", a subsidiary of the Centre. Madonna donated $21 million towards a new Kabbalah school for children. Israeli rabbis condemned the song "Isaac" from Confessions on a Dance Floor because they believed it was a tribute to Rabbi Isaac Luria and claimed that Jewish law forbids commercialising a rabbi's name. Madonna claimed that she had named it after an Israeli singer and said, "The album isn't even out, so how could Jewish scholars in Israel know what my song is about?"
