Greg Barrett

Greg Barrett is a twenty-year veteran of news correspondence for US wire services and newspapers. Prior to writing The Gospel of Rutba: War, Peace, and the Good Samaritan Story in Iraq (Orbis, 2012) and The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok (Wiley, 2008), he was a print journalist working in towns small and large, from Loris, S.C. to Augusta, GA., Rock Hill, S.C., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md., and, Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was entered for a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation into the Bishop Estate's mismanagement of Kamehameha Schools.

In 2000, Barrett was a national correspondent in the Gannett News Service/USA Today Washington bureau when he was sent to Thailand to investigate human trafficking. It was in those reports that he met Father Joe Maier and saw his Mercy Centre orphanages and schools. Surprised by the magnanimous Bangkok charity that lit an otherwise dark corner of the world, Barrett returned five years later to find out why the poor, abandoned, abused, HIV-infected children at Father Joe's charity hopped, skipped, whistled and played at a clip faster than the children in his own relatively affluent cul-de-sac near Washington, D.C. The Gospel of Father Joe became his first nonfiction book. It won a Nautilus Book Award Silver Medal in the category of Conscious Media-Journalism-Investigative Reporting.

In January-February of 2003, Barrett reported from the streets of prewar Iraq during the buildup to the US-led invasion. Seven years later, he returned to Iraq with Shane Claiborne and several other peacemakers to tell the story of how Iraqi Good Samaritans in the rugged desert town of Rutba, Iraq had helped rescue Shane and two other Americans during the Shock & Awe bombing of March 2003. The Gospel of Rutba was first released in June 2012. It paperback edition released in January 2013.