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 tremendous damage from a fire. In this podcast, Fr. Anthony, the priest of St. Michael's at that … [Read more...]
Three 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 former pastor for current problems, and making friends with parishioners. The Temptation of … [Read more...]
Parish 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 rely on truncated or "survivor" samples. To see how easy it is to fall into that trap, let's do … [Read more...]
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 decisions have a built-in conservative bias against change. This leads priests to stay in … [Read more...]
The 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 West without them. It is sobering and somewhat instructive to learn that in the early church … [Read more...]
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 work pastors do consists of repeated interactions. While this does take the pressure off of each … [Read more...]
The Priesthood and 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 have done the hard work of discerning a vision for your parish? Most of us haven't. If … [Read more...]
