Ministers

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, -- Premier Marc L. Bazin resigned unexpectedly yesterday after losing a power struggle with the nation's military rulers.No successor was named by Parliament or the army, and it was un- clear if the move would help efforts to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.The U.S. State Department and Dante Caputo, the U.N. envoy trying to restore democracy to Haiti, welcomed the news. Father Aristide said it may mean he could return from exile within days.The 8,400-member Haitian army, which overthrew Father Aristide in 1991, was placed on maximum alert.

Joseph E. Welsh, a retired Baltimore County public school educator who was also a hospice volunteer and Eucharistic minister, died Monday of melanoma at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. The Oak Crest Village resident was 80. "He was both my teacher and class adviser, and as a teacher, I loved him. He made a big impact on all of our lives," said Laurie J. Bender, who graduated in 1991 from Parkville High School. "He was one of those teachers who helped you learn in a nonthreatening and humorous manner.

The two highest profile pitchmen for Question 6, Rev. Donte Hickman Sr. and Rev. Delman Coates, who in my opinion are not worthy of the title "Reverend," gave this reason for their support: "Let the church be the church, the state be the state, and God be the judge" ("Voices for marriage freedom," Nov. 11). This is nothing more than the blind leading the blind with both falling into the ditch. We have a very important warning about ministers who come in sheep's clothing. Inwardly, they are ferocious wolves who can be identified by their fruit.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told a Baltimore audience Tuesday night that the world's challenges have never been greater, nor come with such speed, and he advocated intervention in struggling countries by powers such as Great Britain and the United States. "I don't think there's been a more difficult time to be a political leader than now," Blair, who left office in 2007, told an audience of 2,800 at Loyola University Maryland. He described challenges posed by globalization and ever-evolving technology and said that "often the best short-term politics is in collision with the best long-term policy.

It was said of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, that if he won the 1928 presidential election he would take orders from the Vatican and not uphold the Constitution. John F. Kennedy famously confronted that anti-Catholic prejudice in a 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy said in part, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote...

A group of ministers plan to arm themselves with Bibles and hit the streets in police cruisers to see first-hand the city's crime scene, so they can develop anti-crime strategies."

The Rev. Calvin Keene saw a problem. The 55-year-old pastor of Memorial Baptist Church noticed that liquor stores were all too common in his Oliver neighborhood. He saw that all too often, those liquor stores, or "cut-rates," attracted crime almost magnetically to the street corners that they inhabited. He saw that while there were multiple cut-rate establishments in Oliver, there wasn't a single grocery store. So he and fellow ministers and community leaders from Baltimoreans United for Leadership Development bought a liquor store and its liquor license.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening picked up the endorsement yesterday of a politically active group of Baltimore-area ministers, who praised his opposition to casino-style gambling and his positions on education and welfare issues.While he has lost the support of Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, a former ally who has endorsed Harford County Executive Eileen M. Rehrmann in the Democratic primary, Glendening has won the backing of a group of influential ministers -- as well as nearly all of the city's state legislators.

MOSCOW -- President Boris N. Yeltsin reversed course and moved immediately yesterday to fire three of his "power" ministers, despite promises Wednesday and Thursday to take his time deciding on a Cabinet reshuffle.Mr. Yeltsin had apparently expected the Duma, or lower house of parliament, to put off a no-confidence vote in the government that had been scheduled for today, but faction leaders had vowed yesterday that the vote would go ahead.They sharply criticized Mr. Yeltsin during the day for offering only vague promises of Cabinet-level changes.

MARYLAND, a state founded on religious tolerance, now finds itself with a handful of ministers who would rather offend than show respect toward others. They use prayers delivered to the House of Delegates in Annapolis as a vehicle to advance their religious views on social issues -- and if they hurt people's feelings in the process, too bad.These ministers are harming their own cause. They are creating new divisions among legislators and demeaning the value of opening prayers during the annual 90-day General Assembly session.

As President Barack Obama begins his second term, he faces a series of Middle East challenges far more daunting than when he began his presidency in 2009. These problems include: •what to do about the Arab-Israeli conflict, with peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority still frozen; •whether to intervene in the civil war in Syria, which has now claimed more than 60,000 lives, with the opposition to the Assad regime becoming more Islamist; •how to manage relations with an increasingly Islamist regime in Egypt in such a way that the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty is not endangered; •how to handle an Iraq on the verge of multiple civil wars, one between the Arabs and the Kurds and the other between Sunnis and Shiites; •how to deal with al-Qaida activity in both Yemen and North Africa (Mali and Algeria)

The two highest profile pitchmen for Question 6, Rev. Donte Hickman Sr. and Rev. Delman Coates, who in my opinion are not worthy of the title "Reverend," gave this reason for their support: "Let the church be the church, the state be the state, and God be the judge" ("Voices for marriage freedom," Nov. 11). This is nothing more than the blind leading the blind with both falling into the ditch. We have a very important warning about ministers who come in sheep's clothing. Inwardly, they are ferocious wolves who can be identified by their fruit.

Supporters of same-sex marriage began running two television commercials in the Baltimore market this week. Each features a Baptist minister pointing out that the new Maryland law would not force churches to perform same-sex ceremonies. What the ads say: The Rev. Donte Hickman Sr. of Southern Baptist Church in Baltimore speaks in one ad, while the other features the Rev. Delman Coates of Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Prince George's County. Both commercials are funded by Marylanders for Marriage Equality.

The Rev. Dorris D. Alcott, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who had been director of religious education at Towson Unitarian Universalist Church, died April 3 of heart failure at Oak Crest Village retirement community. The former longtime Timonium resident was 91. "Dorris was ordained at a time when there were not many women Unitarian Universalist ministers," said the Rev. Clare Petersberger, pastor of Towson Unitarian Universalist Church. "She was a trailblazer.

There was barely a whisper about God during a Carroll County-sponsored seminar Friday on the state constitution. The speaker was introduced as Pastor David Whitney to an audience of about 50 county employees in a lecture hall at Carroll Community College, but he made no attempt to proselytize. "I am honored to be with people who care about their country," said Whitney, the pastor of a Pasadena church who frequently lectures for the Institute on the Constitution. "I commend the county commissioners for having the foresight to offer you an opportunity to study the supreme law of the state.

Sen. Ben Cardin won the support of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance on Monday in his bid for a second term, the latest in a series of endorsements the Democrat hopes will secure his support with black voters in the April primary election. Cardin, who is white, faces State Sen. C. Anthony Muse in the primary. In addition to his work in Annapolis, Muse leads an African-American church in Prince George's County. In 2006, Cardin faced a close Democratic primary race against former congressman and NAACP president Kweisi Mfume.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke endorsed yesterday a set of potentially controversial, anti-crime recommendations offered by a group of Baptist ministers, including a proposal to require parolees to attend church and another that would invite ministers into public schools to promote anti-crime values."

Baltimore will play host next month to about 200 economic ministers from the G-7 countries and Central and Eastern Europe.It will be the first meeting of its kind in the city.The three-day conference, to be held at the Stouffer Renaissance Harborplace Hotel Jan. 8-10, is one in an annual series known as the Muenster Process, which encourages businesses to work with governments."[Conference organizers] selected Baltimore because they saw it a good example of a city that had undergone industrial transformation," said Dana Shelley, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is helping to set up the event.

In the old Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Bolton Hill, the congregation on Sunday gave a prayer of thanks for what the Rev. Andrew Foster Connors described as "the new light of hope arising from the Maryland State House. " Barely two miles down the road in the Greater Harvest Baptist Church, where members demonstrate their devotion by swaying in place and calling out their approval to their pastor's words, the Rev. Rev. Errol Gilliard Sr. issued a call to arms.

An article in the Jan. 13, 1912, edition of The Argus reported on the lonely death of an elderly resident. Hezekiah Boyce , a former negro minister, about 80 years old, was found frozen to death in his shanty on Powers Lane, about two miles northwest of Catonsville, Monday afternoon by Patrolman Stevens , of the county force. Boyce, who lived by himself, had been missing for several days and neighbors notified police. Patrolman Stevens went to the shanty, forced the door and found the aged negro laying on the floor between the bed and the old stove and covered with a few old blankets.