The Role of Education in the Approach to Childbearing in the Clergy Families of the Russian Orthodox Church

The article analyzes the opposition to the level of education of religiosity and large families. Interviews with 20 families of priests as practicing believers with different educational levels were taken and analyzed to consider the problems. We divided the families of priests into three types: traditional; intermediate; managerial. The traditional type is characterized by the respondent’s trust in God in their views on childbearing, in evaluating non-abortion contraception as a sin. Intermediate respondents talk about trusting God in the matter of having children as an ideal, and about using contraception as an acceptable action, compromise and lack of faith; allow its use in relation to their own family. It is common for managerial type respondents to talk about the use of contraception not as a church norm, but as an action relating to the sphere of individual choice of spouses. It is justified by the health, financial condition of the spouses, their desire to be realized in the profession, their own relationships, etc. The study shows that in each type of priestly family attitude to childbearing you can find mostly educated people. The study demonstrates that in each type of priestly family relationship with childbearing, predominantly educated people are found. As the results of the study presented, we write about the absence of a direct correlation between the level of education and attitudes towards childbearing in clergy families, and we also propose considering the construction of types of religiosity that appeal to a person’s attitude to childbirth and birth control.

“Meant to Be?”

Religious and spiritual beliefs can help patients cope and/or prevent them from pursuing certain treatments. Major religions all contain myths about the creation of life—including human beings. Clergy, families, and friends may sanction certain procedures but prohibit others and vary widely, even within any one faith. Religious leaders may oppose a variety of procedures from small to large. Patients can follow or avoid such prohibitions. Patients, family, friends, and providers can misunderstand a religion’s perspectives, making incorrect assumptions and/or disagreeing about whether a particular couple is “meant” to have children. Providers may be unsure how to interact with patients’ beliefs and clergy, especially when the latter, not the patient, is making the decisions.

‘This Sad and Deplorable Condition’: An Attempt towards Recovering an Account of the Sufferings of Northern Clergy Families in the 1640s and 1650s

THE work of Richard Baxter, Edmund Calamy, and John Walker in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of the indefatigable A. G. Matthews and Charles Surman in the twentieth, has illuminated the history of the sufferings of the clergy ejected from their livings in the 1640s and 1650s, and of those who lost their livings at the Restoration and in its aftermath. The history of their families, however, is much less well known. This essay is concerned with the chronicling of the sufferings and with the economic and psychological plight of the families of the clergy ejected in the 1640s and 1650s.