Barnabas File

In  Pastoral Intelligence:  Why Your Emotional Health is the Key to Your Church’s Health , Maurice Graham has shared not only from his lifetime of ministry, but what he has learned from two decades of counseling clergy. Although Graham incorporates the work of emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, the concept of Pastoral Intelligence adds theological intelligence or one’s relationship with God to the mix.   The first part of the book, Graham describes the Transforming Self Triangle.   He shares not only the results of his research related to clergy experience that inform this model, but examples of how this process has been used in his work with clergy.  He builds this personal development model on the work of the Holy Spirit in the clergy person’s life.  From the theological perspective, he notes, “Ministers have to understand that God is always at work in the background. The invisible God is made visible in Christ as redemption is taking place, not only in our past and present bu

I know enough about the Internet, websites, and digital media to be dangerous.  I have no idea about how some of these things work, but I find them useful.  One website I use regularly is Wikipedia.  I occasionally see notes there about “insufficient citations”, “major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with the subject,” or “article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.”  I did not have a clue what these notations mean, who provides them, or how corrections are made until I read The Editors .   The Editors by Stephen Harrison (no relation) provides some insight about this type of resource.  With assistance from some within the Wikipedia community, Harrison has written a “reported work of fiction” about Infopendium.org, a global source of information, and its impact on society.   Harrison’s characters help us understand what drives a person to devote a significant portion of their lives to editing a worldwide encyclopedia—power, greed