GGWB Episode #16: Honor Among Priests
“Honor Among Priests” Fr. Anthony Perkins Good Guys Wear Black Podcast (AFR, 10 November 2016) In this episode, Fr. Anthony uses insights from his former career in intelligence to explain the spiritual...
View ArticleDay4of40 – “Can’t I Just Serve Well?”
This is a question/conversation that comes up fairly regularly with seminarians and priests. I strongly believe that in most American parishes it is NOT enough to just serve well and that one of the...
View ArticleDay5of40 – The Vision Thing
Every priest needs to have a vision for his priesthood and for the parish he serves. Because today’s blog is a continuation of yesterday’s on leadership, this post will focus on the latter. So… do you...
View ArticleDay6of40 – On the Problem of Scientific and Spiritual Validation
As a social scientist, I was trained to test models based on their internal and external validity. A good model would explain a significant portion of the variation within the sample data (i.e. have...
View ArticleDay7of40 – On the Joy of Service, Well Done
One of the many things I am thankful for in being an Orthodox priest is that the most important thing I do is scripted. As a musician, I was never inclined to jazz (or any kind of improvisation); I...
View ArticleDay9of40 – The Joy of Ministry being an Iterated Game
When social scientists model interactions, one of the first things they have to figure out is whether the interactions are iterated (i.e. repeat themselves) or not. Non-iterated games are rare (the...
View ArticleDay10of40 – Pastoral Strategy in an Iterated Game
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the first thing social scientists do when they want to model interactions is figure out whether the interactions are iterated (i.e. repeated). The vast majority of the...
View ArticleDay11of40 – You Can’t Plan for a Funeral
This title is not making a theological statement; of course we can and should prepare for our own funeral. This is about something else. There’s a joke that is popular among priests. It goes...
View ArticleThe Priest and the Parish Council (by Fr. Lawerence Farley)
Parish Councils are like personal computers in a number of ways. The initials for both are P.C.; neither existed before very modern times, and we can scarcely imagine life in the church here in the...
View ArticleDay13of40 – Ten Suggestions for Chanting
Ten Commandments of Chanting and Singing Bring and maintain peace in the kliros. It’s a witness of cooperation, harmony, and reverence – nothing else belongs there (any more than it does in the altar...
View ArticleDay14of40: Advice on Chanting for Priests
General Advice for Priests (I think these are important for just about all of us just about all the time): Develop and maintain a good relationship with your choir director, lead chanter (Dyak), and...
View ArticleDay15of40 – The Beauty of Good Habits (a testimony)
The psychology of developing good habits (and getting rid of old ones) is pretty well understood (not that we really needed psychology to tell us things we already knew). In fact, if we do not have a...
View ArticleDay16of40 – Priests MUST Manage Their (Financial) Households Well
For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God? (1 Timothy 3:5) The church leader must be “one that governs well his own house.” Even those who are...
View ArticleThis Thing Decreased My Stress as a Pastor – Fr. Andrew Damick
From Roads from Emmaus (14 December 2016) By Fr. Andrew Damick This week an article about pastors quitting ministry and even Christianity itself circulated among some of the clergy I know. I see...
View ArticleDay17of40 – You’ve Got to Know When to Hold ‘Em
Priests have relationships with their employers and their organizations that go far beyond those of other professions. Their position is what social scientists call “sticky”, meaning that their career...
View ArticleAn Orthodox Seminary in Toronto – it’s well worth checking out!
The Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College: Rigorous Orthodox Studies in a Full-Service University Setting History For nearly ten years, the Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College in...
View ArticleParish Boards, Truncated Sample Bias, and Parish Reform
Studies in the self-help genre are notorious for their bad science (i.e. for their poorly constructed research designs) – even when they seem to rely on good data. One of the most common traps is to...
View ArticleThree Traps for New (and Old) Priests
There are many traps that new priests fall into (nor are the more experienced immune). Today I want to warn them away from three that occur all too frequently; choosing sides necessarily, blaming the...
View ArticlePodcast Episode 20: Advice for Preparing For and Dealing With Parish Disasters
Good Guys Wear Black Podcast (Ancient Faith Radio), 19 December 2016 Fr. Anthony Perkins On St. Michael’s Day of 2012, the parish of St. Michael the Archangel (UOC-USA) in Woonsocket, RI suffered...
View ArticleOn Personal Preparedness (i.e. the prepper priest)
When you have four hundred pounds of beans in the house, you need have no fear of starvation. Other things, delicacies such as sugar, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, fish, or meat, may come sometimes...
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