Author: Steve

New template! Mark Shea, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! This seems a good deal faster even with the images and webcounter. I am working on getting a new comments feature set up – working out some kinks. I apologize for dumping all the old comments – the enetation service was just not reliable. Unfortunately there was no way to import them.

The owners of the company I work for have friend who is an ordained Baptist minister. He stops by the office from time to time to visit. I was introduced to him some time ago as “a believer” so he hasn’t inquired about the state of my soul. That’s a good thing, because as a Catholic I trust in the mercy of God and the promises of Christ but unless I’ve been to confession in the last three minutes or so I’m not entirely sure. My intellect isn’t perfect so on any given day I just don’t know. Good for me and for my soul that I go to confession regularly! Preacher Willy is an interesting guy – that much I know. I got some schooling on Baptist theology and the structure of their churches. All this after I asked a few questions about where he went to school, what it means for a Baptist to be ordained, and why the congregation votes to install a pastor. At least once I heard him refer to the Baptist church in America as the “Black Church.” I didn’t ask for any clarification on that point. He politics are very closely tied to his religion. He spent a good while telling me that President Bush is just as bad as Clinton was from the standpoint of vices. Clinton’s vice, he said, was lust (I didn’t get a chance to offer him any other vices it might appear Bill struggled with) and that “lust for drink” was Bush’s. I told him it appeared Bush had a drinking problem, but if you believe what he says he’s been off the sauce for quite a while. Reverend Willy said he could be drinking and we wouldn’t know. I thought it was a pretty weak argument against his ability as President but I didn’t get much of a chance to talk when we were talking. He railed on about abortion being a great evil and I didn’t bother to ask if he ever voted on the issue. I’m guessing he doesn’t.

Something he said that surprised me was that salvation and sanctification is a process. I thought their creed was “once saved, always saved.” Again, I didn’t ask for any further clarification. I’m sure he’ll be by another day.

He said if a Baptist feels a calling to preach he approaches his Pastor, tells him he believes he’s being called and they give him the pulpit for a trial run. After that he can go to seminary or not – it’s up to him. He studied by correspondence with a non-denominational seminary in Indiana and was ordained this year. I think he said you don’t have to go to seminary to be ordained. Ordination, in fact, means that you are recognized as a member of the clergy and can marry people and “put them in the ground.” It seems ordination means you have a license from civil authorities to do such things. If you want to be a preacher then you preach, he said. If you are called to be a pastor that’s another thing entirely. Baptist congregations vote to elect a pastor – which I didn’t know. Most congregations want an ordained minister as pastor, and it is often a requirement to distribute communion. I didn’t ask why. Maybe I’ll leave that for another day.

As we were talking about his call to preach, he asked if I thought I was being called. The Catholic working at the desk next to mine, having listened to our one-sided conversation in its entirety, looked at me waiting for my response. I told him the only thing I’m sure of – God is calling me to holiness. “He’s calling everyone to that!” the Reverend exclaimed. On that much we agree, Preacher Willy!

Someone commented on the post below that I should dump the enetation comments to speed up the blog. They are frequently offline and very slow. Let’s see how that works.

but it’s really trying my patience. I will probably choose another template this weekend. I dumped all the pictures on the site that were linked from elsewhere (the ones in the template anyway) and even changed the settings to display only posts from the last three days. Those changes didn’t help. Perhaps we’re on an overloaded blogger server. Most of our fellow St. Blog’s parishoners don’t seem to be having the same problem.

says President Bush.

CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush plans to announce a major policy shift toward logging in national forests Thursday, one that he contends will reduce the risks of wildfires but which also has some environmental groups howling.
Bush’s plan — to be unveiled at an southwestern Oregon fairground near the still-smoldering Squires fire — will make it easier for timber companies to get approval to cut wood in fire-prone national forests.
Several Western governors, and even some environmental groups, have been urging such changes, which they say are necessary to clear forests of decades-long buildups of highly flammable underbrush and dead trees.
“For the good of our economy, we need common-sense forest policy,” Bush said during a stop at Mount Rushmore last week. “We can and we must manage our forests. We must keep them disease-free. We must have reasonable forest policies so as to prevent fires, not encourage them.”
This year’s wildfires across the West have renewed the perennial debate between conservationists who oppose cutting in federal forests and logging interests who argue that underbrush and deadwood increase the risk of fire.

I don’t think conservation is letting forests grow unchecked so that they are prown to massive fires. I know that’s how nature would work without us, but after all we’re stewards of this planet. I don’t believe that means we should leave things totally alone. I think we have a responsibility to manage the growth and utilization of natural resources. Of course, national forests in this country are one thing – rain forests in other countries are a different matter altogether.