Hi, my name is Rick

And if you were unaware of this, I'm on hiatus from blogging... well at least from my primary residence, De Civitate Dei.

I had to spend a week preparing for this moment, but I'll slither back into my cave soon enough. Now, I'm sure some of you will wonder exactly what this is all about. Don't worry, we are too. But we do know how it came about...

The concept was born as a result of the 2006 Catholic Blog awards. Traditionally, the blog awards have been dominated by Professional Catholics, but this year saw some signs of Amateur Catholic penetration. Der Tommissar had coined the term Professional Catholic and applied it to our fellow bloggers whose Catholicism is their trade or their livelihood. From there, we laughed about being the “B-team”, like the cliché of high school cliques. You know, the popular and “with it” A group kids and the majority of the rest of the student body, the B group kids.

So we thought it would be fun to identify ourselves as Amateur or B-Team Catholics and proceeded to make a little logo to sport on our blogs, as if it were a coalition of sorts. But we had to ask ourselves, “What about the masses of other Amateur Catholics out there who might like to join in the fun? Maybe we should start a coalition just for the fun of it.” Well, we’re still not exactly sure how to deal with it, but it’d be a shame to keep it to ourselves, so we created the Amateur Catholic blog as sort of a home base.

The code for the B-Team logo is below.

<a href="http://amateurcatholic.blogspot.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3277/850/1600/AmCathBteam.jpg" alt="Amateur Catholic B-Team Member"</a>

Yeah..yeah...I know. Being an Amateur Catholic doesn't mean you're an amateur blogger and therefore need someone to give you the html for an image, but some folks still like the convenience. ;)

Update: You can find this code, as well as other badge code and instructions here.

If you would also like to display the B-Team blogroll on your blog, you can get the code here.

Membership info