Steven Zahm@ cori
Sorry, there is not much I can do about this unfortunately. The reason is rather technical but I can tell you this is definitely being caused by the theme. Temporarily switch back to the default theme to see for yourself.
Put as simply as possible, the theme seems to have added a filter to the gettext hook. The filter that was added passes the text thru the WordPress shortcode process. This causes WordPress to parse all text everywhere for shortcodes. This is impacting your sites performance and will break things in very unexpected ways. One of which if the Connections : Templates admin page. What is happening there is the instructions contain the [connections] shortcode so WordPress is attempting to show the directory within the instructions and it was designed to so it is breaking.
I can not think of a reason why a filter like this would be added on purpose so it must be a bug.
What I did was deactivated Circled so I could reactivate the default template. You’ll see the directory being shown on the page, which you shouldn’t. The I change the shortcode to this: [connections template='circled']. This manually activates the template for that shortcode instance so it will be sued on that page.
I hope that helps!