Two Canadian ice cream entrepreneurs playfully put “Jesus” in the shop name. Predictably, a lot of Christians aren’t amused.
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If you’ve ever had a scoop of ice cream so good that you find yourself muttering “sweet Jesus” then I have some advice for you: eat more of that ice cream. Now, if you happen to be the owner of an ice cream business and you overhear your customers and employees mutter the same phrase when they taste your ice cream I have some advice for you too: don’t even think about using that expression as the name for your store.
Oops. Too late.
Unfortunately, I’m not acquainted with the owners – Andrew Richmond and Amin Todai – of the Sweet Jesus ice cream shop in Toronto, Canada. If I did, I’d have given them this advice. Now, unfortunately, some are giving them the cold shoulder.
According to a recent article in The Star, both Richmond and Todai have come under fire from religious groups who are claiming that the name of their store is “blasphemous.” Of course, the name has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with that out-of-this-world feeling you get when you have a scoop of their ice cream. Even Richmond and Todd point this out on their website, writing that the company’s name is just a “popular phrase that people use as an expression of enjoyment, surprise or disbelief.”
But this doesn’t matter to the people who are offended. In Canada, where Sweet Jesus has almost twenty locations, people are more chilled…
