The type of man who became bishop during the central Middle Ages depended both on who influenced the selection of the bishop and on what qualities a bishop was expected to have by those who chose him. The process by which a medieval bishop was elected has been studied in great detail, and recently attention has been turned to the backgrounds of some of the men who were elected, especially their social origins.

In the autumn of 1495 Desiderius Erasmus began his theological studies in Paris and during the next four years sampled the wares of Scotists lecturing at the University. From the Augustinian monastery at Steyn, where Erasmus pursued his own studies in secular literature under the disapproving eye of his abbot, the University of Paris must have seemed like a bank of resplendent lights drawing the Christian scholar into the company of learned and erudite colleagues. Exposure to scholasticism and to those who came to sharpen their skills in scholarly disputation soon convinced Erasmus that the light had been an ignis fatuus and that the university was no place for a free and eclectic spirit. Erasmus was as unhappy as a graduate student who realizes too late that he has enrolled in the wrong department at the wrong school. He bitterly complained that the schoolmen were sectarian, contentious, and confused; and he deplored the sparing and deleterious accommodations at the College de Montaigu, his place of residence. A small cadre of Parisian humanists who shared Erasmus' predilection for secular literature furnished the young scholar with some diversion, but Erasmus required little prompting to hasten from Paris. When William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, asked Erasmus to accompany him across the Channel to England in 1499, the Dutch scholar could not have been more pleased. By late summer he had made the crossing and had visited London, and by October he was dining in Oxford with Richard Charnock, Prior of St. Mary's College.

Thesis forty-three of the Ninety-five Theses reads, “Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.” Following the historical convention of dating the Reformation from the Ninety-five Theses of 1517, we may argue that from its inception theology and social ethics were inseparable. One particular aspect of the Reformation impact on social change which has attracted attention and controversy from the sixteenth century to the present is welfare reform. While it would be overbold to claim that reform of poor relief was motivated by theology alone, radical theological change was certainly a major factor. Since righteousness coram Deo was thought to be by grace alone, it became difficult to rationalize the plight of the poor as a peculiar form of blessedness. Thus Luther excoriated the indulgence sellers who robbed the people of needed resources. What was implicit in the Ninety-five Theses became increasingly explicit in the months and years leading up to the publication on January 24, 1522 of the Wittenberg Order.

The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell was a practical experiment in government, but it was an experiment guided by more than practicality alone. For its first three years, it rested heavily on a single ecclesiastical party, the Congregational Independents. This was the party of the preachers John Owen, Philip Nye, Thomas Goodwin, and their fellows and followers. They did not rule alone, but for three years they managed to dominate the governing coalition. They supplied the implicit ideological basis and the explicit personal support for the establishment of the Protectorate, the reign of the major generals, and the refusal of the Protector to accept a crown. Briefly but with lasting effects, England experienced the political consequences of a Congregational Independent regime.

The progressive movement in the United States was a complex set of reforms during the first decades of the twentieth century. Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson focused on the control of the new economic forces in American society by regulating railroad rates or by breaking up large monopolies. Slums, political corruption, and red-light districts troubled the consciences of other progressives such as Jane Addams and Walter Rauschenbusch. These urban progressives believed that an older, rural America produced a sense of community among rural people which mitigated such social problems, and thought that community-oriented settlement houses and churches in the cities could recreate the rural feeling that individuals were a part of their neighborhoods, and urban neighbors then could attack urban problems as a community. Other progressives, such as the anti-vice committees of New York City, wanted laws to recreate the moral standards which social pressures in the old rural communities had maintained informally. The Progressive Era also included a “country life movement” which shared many of its analyses and plans for reform with the urban progressives, but applied them to rural America.

The Jesuits frequently attract public attention, and one such occasion for notoriety occurred in the days of the Communist hunt commonly associated with the name of the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908–1957). During the years from 1950 to 1957 there were repeated attempts to link McCarthy with the Jesuits, (or, paradoxically, to link him with the Senator's opponents). The national Jesuit weekly America became embroiled in one of the most bitter arguments which broke out in the controversy. The events illustrate not only the intensely divisive nature of the dispute over McCarthy, but the peculiar position of the order both in the Church and in the intellectual life of the nation as well.