Clerical Profession Research Articles

The Clerk’s Body: Newspaper Gags Between the War and the Famine

Piciel’s Khooro was published every Sunday between 1935 and 1975 in the English newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika (ABP). This newspaper gags captured the daily struggles of its eponymous protagonist, Khooro, a middle-aged clerk in Calcutta who witnessed first-hand the impacts of WWII and the Bengal Famine (1943). The object of satire in Khooro is the middle-class clerical body caught in these tumultuous times. Khooro depicts prevalent anxieties and fears of the middle-class clerical profession caught in the myriad civic issues of urbanity. Drawing on the methods of periodical and multimodal studies, this article analyzes Khooro gags to propose a “meta-imagetextual” reading of visual-verbal narratives in colonial periodicals that can be rightly called “concomitant literature.”

Regulatory Аffairs in the pharmaceutical industry – insights

The Regulatory Affairs as a field in the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of potential for individual professional growth. Formerly viewed as a clerical profession, growing requirements from competent authorities for a more regulated pharmaceutical industry resulted in growing interest and demand for regulatory proffessionals. The pharmacists working in a modern regulatory department unit are today viewed as key figures in obtaining the company’s goals and objectives. Their expertise can undoubtedly contribute to improving the strategy for the eventual market launch of a pharmaceutical product and provide for a better overall process in developing new products as well as maintaining ones that are already registered. In this essay we delve inside the image surrounding this department, and try to bring forward what is actually behind it. We then look inside the organizational structure and everyday activities of a regulatory department, and offer our thoughts into making the processes in that department more efficient consulting the latest insights from leading experts on this subject. Ultimately, we try to include the application of technological advancements into the picture and what their contribution would mean for managing information and thus an efficient way of functioning in such departments. Keywords: Regulatory Affairs, technology, information, organization, efficient

The Decline of the Clerical Magistracy in the Nineteenth-Century English Midlands

A significant proportion of Church of England clergy in the early nineteenth century took up the role of magistrate to help enforce the law in local communities, partly in consequence of the growth of clerical wealth and status which had begun in the previous century. This legal role was perceived by some as contradictory to clerical pastoral duties, and as such detrimental to the church. Some would view it as contributing to a decline of the Church of England, which was seen as too much associated with the established powers in an era of social change. After the peak of the 1830s, the number of clerical magistrates began to fall dramatically, marking the emergence of a more exclusively religious clerical profession uneasy with the antagonisms associated with local law enforcement. This study, focusing on the diverse county of Staffordshire, presents the case that the decline of the clerical magistracy is an early indicator of the withdrawal of the clergy from involvement in secular concerns, and as such provides important evidence for the growth of secularization in British society.

Robert Owen (1820–1902)

This journal has published two distinguished series on the lives and careers of individual jurists in the history of English church law, from the mediaeval period to the late nineteenth century: one by Professor Sir John Baker on ‘famous English canonists’ (1988–1997); and the other by Professor Richard Helmholz on ‘notable ecclesiastical lawyers’ (2013–2017). Most prepared for their professional careers with the study of civil law at Oxford or Cambridge (and before the Reformation also of canon law). Many practised as judges, advocates and proctors in the church courts (until statute ended much of their jurisdiction in the 1850s). Some wrote treatises on church law. A small number were also priests, but less so as the centuries unfolded. While these professional canonists and civilians may have had a monopoly in practising church law, they did not have a monopoly in thinking or writing about it. The clergy, who never trained or practised as lawyers, also had things to say about church law. But the clerical profession has been somewhat neglected by scholarship as a class contributing to the history of church law and jurisprudence. From diocesan bishops through parish priests to clerical scholars in the universities, their books, pamphlets, sermons, letters and other materials often deal with the nature, sources and subjects of church law. Their aims vary: from the educational through the historical or theological to the practical and polemical. These priest-jurists – fathers-in-law, they might quip – contributed much to the intellectual development of church law. One is Robert Owen, a Welsh scholar cleric whose books include Institutes of Canon Law (1884). No scholar has to date unveiled Owen as a notable Anglican priest-jurist – strangely, he has been lost to scholarship as among those whom he himself chided as ‘eminent Canonists’ who ‘hide themselves’ and remain ‘veiled Prophets’.

Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster. By Simone Laqua-O’Donnell. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+214. $99.00.

<i>Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster</i>. By Simone Laqua-O’Donnell. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+214. $99.00.

Work-related psychological health and psychological type: a study among Catholic priests in Italy

This paper explores the connection between psychological type and burnout among a sample of 155 Catholic priests serving in Italy. Burnout was assessed by the Francis Burnout Inventory that draws on Bradburn's classic model of balanced affect to conceptualise poor work-related psychological health (burnout) in terms of high levels of emotional exhaustion in ministry in the absence of good levels of satisfaction in ministry. Psychological type was assessed by the Francis Psychological Type Scales that draw on the development of Jung's classic model that distinguishes between two orientations (extraversion and introversion), two perceiving functions (sensing and intuition), two judging functions (thinking and feeling), and two attitudes (judging and perceiving). The data demonstrated that higher levels of burnout were experienced by introverts than by extraverts. These findings are consistent with the view that the clerical profession has been shaped by inter-personal expectations that are more readily met by extraverts.

The Moderating Effects of Congregational and Denominational Support on the Impact of Stress on Clerical Emotional and Physical Health Status

This research is the third component of a three-part series that explores the relationship between stress and health in the clerical profession. The first article (Wells J Relig Health 51:215–230, 2012) determined that there is an association between two different sources of stress in the clerical profession (work-related stress and boundary-related stress). The second article (Wells Pastor Psychol 62:101–114, 2013) determined that there is an association between the two sources of stress and two differing measures of health (emotional health and physical health). This third and final article establishes congregational and denominational support as possible moderators of the effects of both sources of stress on emotional and physical health. The same dataset utilized in the two previous studies is used in this research. Simple and multiple regression are utilized. This research determined that support from both the congregation and the denomination moderates or lessens the negative effects of stress on clerical health status.

The Effects of Work-Related and Boundary-Related Stress on the Emotional and Physical Health Status of Ordained Clergy

This research is the second component of a three-part series that explores the relationship between stress and health in the clerical profession. The first article (Wells, Journal of Religion and Health 51(1):215–30, 2012) determined that there is an association between two different sources of stress in the clerical profession (work-related stress and boundary-related stress). This research explores the association between these two sources of stress and two different measures of health (emotional health and physical health). Utilizing the same dataset from the previous research (Wells, Journal of Religion and Health 51(1):215–30, 2012), and simple and multiple regression, this research determined that there is a positive association between the two sources of stress (work-related stress and boundary-related stress) and the two measures of health (physical health and emotional health). African-American and obese clergy exhibited lower levels of physical health as stress increased. Clergy with children and those with higher levels of education exhibited lower levels of emotional health as stress increased. African-American clergy consistently exhibited higher levels of emotional health than their White colleagues did. Finally, age and length of time in ministry are associated with higher levels of emotional health but lower physical health status.

The Relationship Between Work-Related Stress and Boundary-Related Stress Within the Clerical Profession

The concepts of work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict have been studied extensively in recent years. We propose a different means of understanding clergy work and family stressors because the boundaries between family and work are blurred within the clerical profession. We suggest, therefore, that the stressors associated with ordained ministry can be better analyzed if separated into two related, but distinct categories: (1) stressors stemming from the demands of the work (work-related stress) and (2) stressors stemming from the way the work impinges upon clerical family boundaries (boundary-related stress). Utilizing the Pulpit and Pew Clergy Leadership Survey of 2001, we explore the association between these two forms of stress. Correlation analysis and simple and multiple regression models are used. A strong association between work-related stress and boundary-related stress is detected; length of time spent in the profession is related to reduced levels of boundary- and work-related stress.

Vital Statistics: Episcopal Ordination and Ordinands in England, 1646-60

ON 25 September 1659, the funeral of Thomas Morton, the nonagenarian bishop of Durham, took place at St Peter's Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire. The preacher praised Morton's faithful service ‘as a bishop till the very last gasp’ and cited ‘his late ordinations of priests and deacons here among you, whereof some here present received the benefit, and many more can give the testimony’.1 It is well-known that between 1646 and 1660, several bishops, including Morton, conferred holy orders in defiance of the Long Parliament's ordinance of 9 October 1646 abolishing the office and jurisdiction of bishops,2 but hitherto no one has calculated the exact numbers of ordaining bishops and ordinands or placed this activity within the context of contemporary debates over the validity of ministerial orders, so the incidence and significance of these illegal ceremonies remain unclear. Now, with the powerful assistance of the Clergy of the Church of England Database, it is possible to produce reliable figures of ordainers and ordinands, and to demonstrate a high demand for ordination which was met by bishops willing to perform the ceremony. This evidence throws important new light on the organisation, practice and popularity of episcopalianism in the late 1640s and 1650s. We shall challenge the prevalent view that the episcopate abandoned its pastoral responsibilities in the Interregnum, and suggest that the rising demand for episcopal ordination in the 1650s reveals the enduring appeal of traditional episcopalian orders in a period of proscription and intermittent persecution, at a time when the episcopate itself looked unlikely to survive for much longer.3 That ordinands were able to make contact with a diminishing number of bishops points to the effective operation of a series of semi-clandestine networks of episcopalian loyalists. Many ordinands were already serving in the state church, or else upon ordination entered the parochial ministry. This allows us to revise our understanding of the character of the clerical profession during the Interregnum. What follows falls into three sections: first, we present the evidence for ordinations in the 1640s and 1650s and analyse those bishops who were, and who were not, active ordainers; secondly, we explore the connections which allowed ordinands to be in touch with ordaining bishops; and thirdly, we investigate the motivation and careers of the ordinands themselves.

The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840 - By W. M. Jacob

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 34, Issue 1 p. 88-90 The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680–1840 – By W. M. Jacob Ryan K. Frace, Ryan K. Frace Wellesley CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Ryan K. Frace, Ryan K. Frace Wellesley CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 February 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2009.00842.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume34, Issue1March 2010Pages 88-90 RelatedInformation

The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880, by William R. McKelvy

Reviewed by: The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 Kate Flint (bio) The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880, by William R. McKelvy; pp. xii + 322. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007, $45.00, £28.95. The topic of religion in the nineteenth century is currently undergoing something of a revival, once again appearing as a field of contestation. The debate positions on the one side those who, like George Levine, are emphatically anti-Weberian and argue strongly for the growing secularity of the Victorian realist novel, against those who, like Colin Jager and Amy King, would see the theological heritage as far harder to shake off. William R. McKelvy's stimulating study, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880, firmly positions him within the latter camp. But rather than looking to the enduring presence of natural theology to underpin his arguments, McKelvy embeds his points within the history of print culture and of reading, exploring the role that religious professionals had in establishing, consolidating, and indeed questioning the authority of print throughout this period. In the course of this study, McKelvy makes a number of cogent points. Above all, he advances the idea that one should not look so much for conflicts between the secular and sacred contexts of reading as for the overlaps that exist between them: overlaps that exist not just in an intertextual way, but—he is strikingly original in emphasizing this—at the very level of practice. The modern "cult of literature," which has long been assumed to constitute a sort of secular priesthood, in fact is not as easily separable from actual religious authority as commentators have tended to assume. In other words, rather than going along with the view that modern literary authority develops as a result of religion's decline, McKelvy argues that in many significant ways its establishment was dependent upon the continuation of various forms of religious scholarship and polemical dialogue. Central among these are questions of origins—to be found in Biblical hermeneutics and in debates about reading the literary remains of antiquity as much as in geology—and issues concerning vocation, interpretive independence, and the continued influence of the figure of the religious teacher and prophet on debates concerning national literature and culture. McKelvy's general introduction outlines the theories and descriptions of the supposedly sacred function of literature in the nineteenth century that have been rehearsed and made familiar by many subsequent commentators. This is followed by chapters on, successively, Robert Lowth, Thomas Warton, and Thomas Percy; Walter Scott; John Keble and Thomas Babington Macaulay; W. E. Gladstone, with particular reference to his reading of Homer (and pornography); and the "pseudo-ecclesiastical career of George Eliot," a chapter that moves neatly from the clerical lives at the heart of her early fiction through to the prophetic voices of Daniel Deronda (1876). As this roll [End Page 350] call of literary figures suggests, this is a book that stretches across genres as well as decades and reading audiences. McKelvy's frame of reference is exceptionally wide, anchored in place, to be sure, by the familiar triad of Samuel Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, but it shows an exceptional grasp of intellectual and literary culture during the period, and of its subsequent critical fortunes. (Given the scope, it was surprising that he doesn't engage with the relatively recent work of Stefan Collini on Victorian intellectuals, however.) McKelvy writes with commanding—if occasionally a little portentous—authority. The book's illustrations are well chosen: especially striking for its suggestive mingling of cultural influences is the 1775 depiction of Percy (in an engraving after Joshua Reynolds) standing in a moody yet heroic pose, his bulging manuscript under one arm, an unusual, rakishly oriental hat on his head, and his clerical collar shining luminous white round his neck. A number of points stand out in the development of a convincing thesis. McKelvy deftly demonstrates the scale on which authorship and the clerical profession overlapped during the period. He writes well about the way in which the age confused, to an unprecedented degree, literary and religious lives. The implications of the anthology boom...

The Factor Structure of a Measure of Burnout Specific to Clergy, and Its Trial Application with Respect to Some Individual Personal Differences

A 30-item measure of burnout appropriate to members of the clerical profession was constructed around the Maslachian dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and lack of personal achievement, and administeredto a sample of 1071 Anglican stipendiary ministers in the UK. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the measure was best represented by a three-factor solution, although the overall fit was poor. Successive exploratory and confirmatory analyses, combined with the stepwise removal of ambiguous or poorly fitting items, produced a refined 20-item, three factor scale with satisfactory psychometric properties. However, the three Maslachian factors were strongly intercorrelated. The results provided by the compact scale suggested that the clergy were not particularly subject to the adverse effects of burnout and that self-reported job satisfaction was high. Separate hierarchical regressions were conducted for each of the three dimensions with respect to several personality, demographic and job-related variables. Most of the variability in the data was accounted for by the intercorrelations among the three dimensions, but neuroticism was a significant predictor of exhaustion, psychoticism of depersonalization, and extroversion of achievement. Few of the demographic and job-related variables were significant predictors. However, marital status was a significant predictor of exhaustion, age was a negative predictor of depersonalization, and job-satisfaction was greatest in populous parishes.

Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy: Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Saint Errantry

Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy: Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Saint Errantry Oliver Lovesey Shaftesbury classifies "divineENTHUSIASM" as a particularly dangerous moral, medical, and cultural disorder in "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm," warning moreover that "something of this militant Religion, something of this Soul-rescuing Spirit, and Saint-Errantry prevails still."1 Anxieties about enthusiasm were acute in the long eighteenth centurywhen anti-nonconformist sentiment and especially anti-popery helped fashion a sense of national identity,2 a project pardy carried out by narrative means. Anti-nonconformist writing frequently associated nonconformist Christian confessions with sexual 1 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm," Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings in English with Parallel German Translation, vol. 1.1, ed. and trans. Gerd Hemmerich and Wolfram Benda (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981), 372, 330. References are to this edition. 2 Jeremy Gregory, "Gender and the Clerical Profession in England, 1660-1850," Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1998), pp. 251-53. Lawrence E. Klein and AnthonyJ. La Vopa contend, however, that writing against enthusiasm migrated from the religious to the political domains only at the end of the eighteenth century. "Introduction," Enthusiasm and Enliglitenmenl in Europe, 1650-1850, special issue ofHuntington Library (Quarterly 60:1-2 (1998-99), 4. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3,April 2004 374 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION irregularityandwith, atits extreme, love-melancholy or "erotomania,"3 a malady thatJacques Ferrand claimed arose pardy from spiritualizing the beloved as an "idol" (p. 252), and enthusiasm itself was widely regarded in the period as a manifestation of melancholy, and increasingly as a condition best treated by physicians rather than divines. Laurence Sterne, in his sermon "On Enthusiasm," for example, laments that "These deluded people ... call for the aid ofa physician who can cure the distempered state ofthe body, rather than one who may sooth the anxieties of the mind."4 While advancing a variety of methods of recovery, including raillery, Shaftesbury advocated the acceptance of the consolation ofsocial affections,5 by which he indicated a range of communal ties between men and between women, as well as between the sexes. However, as we see in the treatment ofdivine enthusiasm and love melancholy in satiric or sentimental anti-nonconformist narratives of saint errantry by Shaftesbury, Rasiel de Selva, and Richard Graves, which serve to illustrate Sterne's much more complex handling of the subject, this antidote for religious enthusiasm anchored in communal relations and including relations between the sexes could itself become a destabilizing force, especially when the object ofdesire is the religious woman. In this situation, the purity ofreligious longing, modified by natural affections, becomes tainted with an overpowering eroticism and especially a morbid obsession with fetishized virginity. Thus, as 3 "Erotomania" was the tide ofEdmund Chilmead's 1640 translation ofFerrand's De la maladie d'amourou melandwlieemtinue. Ferrand's A Treatiseon Lovesidtness, as the text is named in Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella's magisterial edition, is a compendium of medical, philosophical, and literary lore, as well as a program oftreatment for a disease that Ferrand claims is bodi common and dangerous. Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Beecherand Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). References are to this edition. In my discussion ofFerrand, I am indebted to Beecher and Ciavolella's analysis. 4 Tlte Sermons ofLaurence Sterne, Tlie Florida Edition oflite Works ofLaurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1996), 4:366. References to "On Enthusiasm" are to this edition. See also Michael Heyd, "Robert Burton's Sources on Enthusiasm," History ofEuropean Ideas 5 (1984), 17-44, and Heyd, "Medical Discourse in Religious Controversy," Science in Context8:l (Spring 1995), 133-57. 5 Shaftesbury was "one ofdie first" to reappraise enthusiasm as a common and also a useful passion, as Susie I. Tucker points out in the context ofan extended definition and linguistic analysis of the term in Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 138. Shaftesbury's critique constituted a "rehabilitation" ofthe term, argues Heyd in "Be Sober and Reasonable": The Critique ofEnthusiasm in tlte Seventeenth andEarly Eigliteenth Centuries (Leiden: EJ...

Prospects for Change? Structural, Cultural and Action Dimensions of the Careers of Pioneer Women Priests in the Church of England

Like other organizations the Church of England has adapted to the greater and increasing involvement of women in paid work and other parts of the public domain. However, this has been a gradual, strongly contested and painful process for the Church. In 1986, it allowed women to enter the lowest rank of the clerical profession as deacons, and after many years of hard and bitter struggle the vote was won in the General Synod to ordain women to the priesthood.1 The first women priests were ordained in 1994. This article reports a study of 31 of the most senior and experienced Church of England women priests from dioceses across the whole of England.Women entering previously male‐dominated, or male exclusive occupations as in the case of the priesthood, are necessarily engaged in a process of change. The women priests in this study were active agents for change, they wanted to change the organization, both structurally and culturally. This article examines the question of whether these women ‘pioneers’ in the Church of England stand any chance of changing the organization and the occupation, or whether and to what extent they are changed themselves by needing to ‘fit in’. It will look at the structural and cultural factors, which may inhibit their agency or support it.

The Pastoral Care of the Anglican Clergy Today: a Matter of Low Self-Esteem?

The 20-item low self-esteem scale proposed by the Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP) was completed by 1,148 Anglican male clergy and 523 Anglican female clergy during their first year in ordained ministry. The data demonstrated that male clergy recorded higher scores on the index of low self-esteem than men in general. Female clergy also recorded higher scores on the index of low self-esteem than women in general. The low self-esteem recorded by both male and female Anglican clergy is discussed in the light of the marginalisation of the clerical profession within contemporary society.

Standards for Admission To the Ministry of the Church of England in the Eighteenth Century

ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s of failing to have any standards for admission to the ministry: if one thing united the stereo typical younger son of the aristocracy and the impoverished curate who entered the clerical profession, so the Church's critics argued, it was that both were woefully unqualified and unprepared for their role.1 It was often alleged that the Church's hierarchy did very lit tle to remedy the situation, being more concerned with politics and their own personal advancement than with the professional standards of the clergy under their charge.2 Historians of the clerical profes sion have in the twentieth century largely concurred with these views. While the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the one hand, and the nineteenth century on the other, have been held up as periods when the Church successfully tightened up its entry require ments as a prerequisite to improving the clerical profession, the period between 1660 and 1830 is usually seen as one where few, if any, professional requirements were required.3 It is the contention of this

Gender and the Clerical Profession in England, 1660–1850

The relationship between the two co-ordinates of this essay, ‘gender’ and ‘the clerical profession’, might be interpreted in a number of ways. It could, for instance, be taken to mean the manner in which clergy articulated and encouraged differences in gender roles. For it is certainly true that the most commonly quoted conduct books of the period – and especially those which prescribed roles for women – were written by the clergy. Clerics like James Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister in London, in his popular Sermons to Young Women (1765) advised his presumed audience:

Begrebet 'irregularitet' i den middelalderlige kirke

A series of registres in the archives of the Papal Penitentiary in Rome, only recently made accessible to historical research, contain papal absolutions and dispensations from the Later Middle Ages in large numbers. Many of them are dealing with irregularity, a canon law concept designating various hindrances to ordination. After a short introduction to the Penitentiary and its archives, the first part of the articles examines the different forms of irregularity as described in canon law, trying to compare legal prescriptions with administrative practice. The second part of the article examines in detail the most common form of irregularity in the registers of the Penitentiary, namely that illegitimate persons because of their so-called "birth defect" could not enter the clerical profession without a papal dispensation. Having followed the development of this idea from the early 9th to the late 13th century, the article in its conclusion discusses how to interpret the concept of irregularity compared to more well-known forms of religious uncleanness. It is argued that the canon law concept is a complex one, through which the medieval Church tried not only to secure the cleanness of the clergy because of its liturgical functions, but also to uphold Church authority and clerical reputation and to prevent people totally unfit for an ecclesiastical career from entering the profession.

The influence of personality on clergy role prioritization, role influences, conflict and dissatisfaction with ministry

The short form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire was completed by 170 male full-time stipendiary parochial clergy within one Anglican diocese, together with indices of role prioritization, role influences, role conflict and dissatisfaction with ministry. The data demonstrate that Eysenck's three major dimensions of personality (extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism) are able to account for significant individual differences in all these key areas of ministry performance and assessment. In particular, it is those clergy who score high on neuroticism and high on psychoticism who show most signs of dissatisfaction with ministry and are most likely to entertain thoughts of seeking alternative forms of employment. The implications of these findings are assessed both for the development of the clerical profession and for the structuring of further research into the relationship between personality theory and the selection, training and deployment of clergy.