Top voices highlight important changes in the role of bishop. Compelling essays, written by bishops, other clergy, and academics from across the Episcopal Church, reflect the breadth of thinking on the history, current state, and future of the role of leadership within the denomination and the wider Anglican Communion. Topics include the transformation of the role over the last fifty years, a review of historic documents on the episcopacy, issues of race and gender, and the definition of ministry and leadership. This volume will be of interest to leaders across denominations as well as scholars.

The eighteenth-century bishops of the Church of England and its sister communions had immense status and authority in both secular society and the Church. They fully merit fresh examination in the light of recent scholarship, and in this volume leading experts offer a comprehensive survey and assessment of all things episcopal between the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the early nineteenth-century. These were centuries when the Anglican Church enjoyed exclusive establishment privileges across the British Isles (apart from Scotland). The essays collected here consider the appointment and promotion of bishops, as well as their duties towards the monarch and in Parliament. All were expected to display administrative skills, some were scholarly, others were interested in the fine arts, most were married with families. All of these themes are discussed, and Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies receive specific examination.

Micheal Buckley argues that a theology of papal primacy, as opposed to an idealogy, must focus on its nature as a unique relationship whose term or purpose is the unity of bishops amond themselves and through them the unity of the entire Church.