Like most of the great early modern philosophers, George Berkeley was not a university professor. He pursued, instead, a career in the clergy of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Berkeley was ordained in 1710, the same year he published his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge (Berman 1994, 17). His first clerical post was as chaplain to Lord Peterborough from 1713-1714 (80). From here, ...

Viewing ordained ministry as “a troubled profession” is not new. In his 1956 book, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, H. Richard Niebuhr referred to the ministry as “The Perplexed Profession.” Niebuhr attributed the problem primarily to the lack of “a clear-cut, generally accepted conception of the office of the ministry” which he thought, at the time was emerging. Unfortunately, histo...

PURPOSE This article reports on the interest within the religious community in a medical-religious partnership model designed to address some of the health challenges communities face as the population continues to age and become more diverse. DESIGN AND METHODS A geographically and religiously diverse group of 183 clergy who were attending a continuing education program on theology and preac...

Predisposing narcissistic personality factors and the unique demands of the ministry may combine to create an emotional and spiritual crisis in some members of the clergy. This article examines (a) the concept of selective or inadequate mirroring that can contribute to Ihe development of a false self in narcissistically vulnerable clergy, (b) the unique demands of the ministry that can reinforc...

Janet Finch's chapter explores some of the ethical problems involved in interviewing women. Drawing on her own work in which she interviewed clergy wives, and mothers involved in playgroups, she looks at the development of trust in the interview situation, and the exploitative potential of this. As she points out, if you are a woman sociologist, reasonably skilled m the arts of qualitative rese...