The Clerical Dilemma is the first book-length study of Peter of Blois's life, thought, and writings in any language

This book explores the relationship between personal spirituality and pastoral ministry, extolling the pastor's primary role as spiritual instructor to the parish. Leech shares with pastors and spiritual directors the important insights that counseling and psychotherapy lend to the process of spiritual direction. Leech amkes concrete his advice in spiritual formation by holding up the lives of four parish priests who were a great influence on his own spiritual development, and of whom the Church Times writes, All were gospel radicals.

Family tried to seperate a happily wed couple. But sudden wealth levels the playing field. Family drama tries to come between them, but their love will survive.

The first broad-ranging social history in English of the medieval secular clergy.

Voices of Conscience analyzes how the link between politics and conscience was articulated and shaped throughout the seventeenth century by confessors who acted as counsellors to monarchs. Against the backdrop of the momentous intellectual, theological, and political shifts that marked this period, the study examines comparatively how the ethical challenges of political action were confronted in Spain and France and how questions of conscience became a major argument in the hegemonic struggle between the two competing Catholic powers. As Nicole Reinhardt demonstrates, 'counsel of conscience' was not a peripheral feature of early-modern political culture, but fundamental for the definition of politics and conscience. Tracing the rise and fall of confessors as counsellors reveals the parallel transformation of both, approaching a historical understanding of the modernisation of politics with the idea of an 'individual conscience' at its heart. Placed at the junction of norms and practices, royal confessors, directly or in oblique reflection, shaped the ways in which the royal conscience was identified and scrutinized. By the same token, the royal confessors' expertise and activities remained a source of anxiety and conflict that triggered wide debate on the relationship between State and Church, religion and politics. The notion of 'counsel of conscience', of which this book provides the first in-depth analysis, allows the reader to re-examine and challenge fundamental historical paradigms such as the emergence of 'absolutism', individualisation, and the division of public and private. Putting theological concepts and religious dimensions back into political theory and practice sheds new light, not only on the importance of counselling for early modern statecraft, but also on the reconfiguration of the normative frameworks underlying it.

Emphasizing real-world examples, Komorita and Parks illustrate both the theoretical and the ecological relevance of social dilemmas, focusing on "exchange theory" to explain how conflicts are resolved. This book is appropriate for students of psychology, political science, and sociology.

The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.