About This Site
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish website is operated and maintained as a lay, volunteer effort by James Talley on behalf of the parish community. All appropriate effort is made to secure proper permission for material found on this site. Site content is overseen and approved by Sr. Rose Walters and/or Fr. Frank Coady, but responsibility for errors on the site rests entirely with James Talley. Correspondence privacy is guarded by strict adherence to the guidelines in Feedback. Please report any technical problems or other errors--and especially helpful suggestions--to SaintEAS@aol.com.
ABOUT LINKS FROM THIS SITE
IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ
Every caution has been taken in offering links from this site to make sure that the immediate destinations of those links are not blatantly offensive or in obvious conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. However, further destinations reachable by following link to link may indeed land a visitor in strange waters.
The internet and world wide web are unimaginably vast and interconnected. Amid the myriad twists and turns, on-ramps and off-ramps of the information superhighway, nearly any route can take you to any place, sooner or later. One consequence of this reality is the fact that not all roads lead to Rome, so to speak. If you follow connections long enough, you may link to material not endorsed by the Catholic Church, no matter how conscientiously selected the material on this site. I especially encourage parents to supervise their children as they utilize the internet, even with apparently "positive" websites.
One very difficult fact of life about the internet is that sites containing potentially useful, informing and enriching material may also contain material that is theologically unsophisticated, or which is presented in a style or form that may strike a visitor as improper--perhaps too strident, too liberal, too conservative, etc. Nearly every website has some sort of agenda or intention, and few sites admit their intentions up front. Discovering these intentions is sometimes difficult, and evaluating them is a matter of personal discernment in many cases. The internet is a medium of communication, and all communication has a purpose, whether to inform, to persuade, to excite, or to entertain. No website is perfect, but the ones linked from this site are assumed to be sincere in their messages, whether or not a given visitor personally agrees with the substance of those messages.
While we should be grateful for the efforts of individuals in creating Catholic-related personal websites (this site, in fact, falls into that category), few such sites will be included in this site's links. The reason is practical and cautionary: an individual may radically alter a personal site's content at a moment's notice. What was orthodox and useful on Monday may be unorthdox or completely irrelevant on Tuesday. For that reason, the links on these pages are primarily to sites maintained by or affiliated with organizations and institutions because these can be presumed to boast a degree of stability and continuity not necessarily true of personal web pages.
Despite external criticism of the Catholic Church for limiting dissent, an amazing variety of views and opinions are held by individuals and organizations legitimately calling themselves Catholic. While we may not endorse or agree with all these views, they do paint a picture of who we as Catholics are, for better and for worse. Exposure to the diversity of viewpoints represented within the Church, while sometimes challenging, can be salutary for our lives of faith and reason. When possible, and as time and available resources permit, links from this site will contain brief descriptions of linked websites, drafted either by myself or submitted by/pulled from the linked site itself (the latter will appear in quotation marks). This practice is intended to give fair warning to visitors about the linked site's contents and approach. In the interests of avoiding too much personal editorializing, however, these descriptions will be brief and necessarily less-than comprehensive.
You may also find that there will be some degree of turnover in the links from this site. On one visit, you may find a given link which may not be listed on your second visit. This is because St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish's site contents are under on-going scrutiny by myself and our pastors. If a link does not appear or is removed from a listing, it should assumed that either (a) the link does not appear to, in the judgment of this site's overseers, serve the specific pastoral needs of our parishioners at this time; and/or (b) the link has yet to be evaluated. The latter is more likely to be the case, given the enormity of material relating to Catholicism on the internet and the limited resources of myself and this site's overseers.
It should always be remembered that this website is maintained, and full responsibility for its contents is accepted, by one individual, a Catholic layman quite unschooled in many matters of current controversy. It should also be remembered that controversy is not always to be feared or met with rejection; that challenging views can be offered in a spirit of sincerity, and can prompt reflection, scrutiny, prayer and thus, can deepen our lives of faith.
To put it more officially, some of the links on this site will allow you to leave the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish site. Those links are not under the control of the website manager, and I am not responsible for the contents of any linked site or any link contained in a linked site. These links are provided to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by myself, let alone St. Elizabeth Ann Seton's staff or clergy, of the site.
That said, I hope that any problems or concerns you may have with the links, or anything else on these pages, will be sent to me at SaintEAS@aol.com.
UPDATES TO THIS SITE
Ideally, this site is updated each week, slightly before, during or slightly after the weekend. Lapses in this update schedule do occur due to my being out of town or under a heavy workload. I apologize for these lapses, and renew my call for any parishioner with a computer who would be willing to lend a hand with the website. (The work is not difficult; if you can send email, you can help a great deal.)
A NOTE ABOUT GRAPHICS
You may have noticed that these pages lack graphics. This is not a reflection of animosity toward the visual arts, rather a consequence of low technology and even lower technical know-how. While text-only sites tend to load faster (a distinct advantage on the internet), this was merely a consolation in my ignorance and not a reason to avoid graphics altogether. Perhaps, as funds permit upgrades and continuing education, this site will see some visual enhancement.