Church on Sunday, Work on Monday by Laura Nash, Scotty McLennan Good Work by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon Faith, Morals and Money by Edward G Zinbarg
Baker, Thomas
THE ODD COUPLE Thomas Baker Business and religion have always made an ugly cou-pie. From the Busy Folks' Bible Class at George Babbitt's local church to J. F. Powers's Billy Cosgrove, we imagine...
...Sooner or later, they'll learn one of business's ultimate lessons: The Lord helps those who help themselves.ho help themselves...
...Or, just maybe, they're waiting for "the church" to do the work for them...
...Catholic social teaching gets two pages, and other traditions don't fare much better-but the goal doesn't seem to be completeness...
...scientists competing fiercely for grant support and professional prominence...
...Edward Zinbarg's Faith, Morals and Money is in this tradition...
...The businesspeople interviewed in Church on Sunday don't pull any punches pointing out how little interest their churches take in what they do for a living...
...In fact, there are few outstanding resources available-in a parish, or in a professional setting-to help people evaluate their vocational choices and the decisions and investments they make in light of their faith...
...Here the question raised by its three psychologist authors is: Every profession at its best can produce "good work"-work that is expert and advances the common good, and that somehow isn't motivated entirely by money or greed...
...If churches want to reach business people, they could do worse than start from those assumptions...
...A growing industry of nondenominational but vaguely spiritual books, workshops, and groups is already talking about fairness, leadership, and vocational choice...
...But in general, church ministry is ministry to people who need help desperately-not to people who work...
...The book, like Church on Sunday, is based on interviews with practitioners, but here the focus is on two fields within which there is a constant tension between money and professional responsibility: genetic science and journalism...
...Much of this sort of talk ends up as compromised and Babbitt-like as you might imagine (the dreadful Jesus, C.E.O...
...Just last month, I heard a blanket condemnation from the pulpit of all advertising as exploitation, and all media as manipulative...
...Yes, we have Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan's Legatus, where Catholic CEOs get together to celebrate church teaching (a tradition "second to none," brags its Web site...
...The conversations describe the pressures you'd expect to hear about: reporters ordered to pursue dopey stories rather than real news...
...Most business people, Church on Sunday says, are basically optimistic: in theory and even in practice, they tend to like change, building, competition, and fixing problems...
...It's no wonder that churches generally want (except for fundraising, of course) to keep their distance...
...But they can also provide a nonprofit-motivated setting to debate what's right, as well as moral and practical support for members under pressure to bend their standards...
...is just one example...
...And so we're left wondering why, in a church with such a strong tradition of economic justice, so few work-related ministries and faith-based associations have emerged...
...The result: people who feel their church doesn't know very much about, and mostly doesn't respect, what they're doing most of their waking hours...
...But simply because busi-nesspeople haven't formed a bond with their peers to set those standards doesn't mean it can't happen...
...Somehow, they pollute it with eagerness for success, cheery optimism, and a propensity for dishonesty when the going gets tough...
...Unlike most business books, their work is well written and succinct-great reading for both people inside the church as ministers and working people who want a basic introduction to the issues...
...Zinbarg is out to assure people that in most situations, all religious traditions would come to similar conclusions about the moral imperatives of business...
...The solution, of course, may not lie inside the churches at all...
...But the best of it does give people some sort of structure for "principle-centered living," as the Mormon management thinker Stephen Covey calls it...
...When they hear preaching about business-if they hear it at all-it's to expose commerce as a nasty symptom and perhaps a root cause of materialistic malaise...
...But Covey's success comes from acknowledging that most people work in a complex, nondenominational world-and that the average business person does want, in some way, both to do good and to do well...
...Church on Sunday, Work on Monday tries to explain why churches have done such a poor job relating to churchgoers as working people...
...But there aren't many signs that church programs, preaching, or parishes have found effective ways to get that message across...
...One staple in the attempt to apply faith to work is the business-ethics casebook, with emblematic moral dilemmas showing the competing priorities busi-nesspeople face...
...Zin-barg, a former insurance executive who pursued graduate studies in religion after retirement, certainly can't be accused of being parochial in his approach, since in the first part of his book he attempts nothing less than a synthesis of the moral traditions of all the major faiths of both East and West...
...Furthermore, with only two professions under discussion, the book seems much longer than it needs to be...
...Price gouging, discrimination, child labor-they're all here, but not in a particularly usable form...
...How does that happen...
...Most important, joining together can give people in the profession a credo to come back to, even if subconsciously, when difficult issues arise...
...To be sure, his turgid but endlessly bestselling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is more a gospel of personal empowerment than the whole gospel...
...They could also give some attention to Good Work...
...Their religious goal, if they have one, is to be in the bishop's foursome at next year's diocesan golf outing...
...Laura Nash, a Harvard Business School researcher, and Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life at Stanford (and yes, once the prototype for Doonesbury's Reverend Scott Sloan), are a surprisingly good combination to tackle this lacuna...
...In the Catholic Church we've had several generations to live with Vatican II's reminder that what we do with our working lives has ultimate significance...
...While he makes some entertaining points, particularly about his Jewish heritage, I don't think he proves his case...
...And as always with the evidence that gets presented in ethics books, anyone coming to business from the outside will find it to be a pretty foul swamp...
...When it comes to a business book, I think I'll take generic religion over any of these offerings...
...Such associations can easily become forums for self-congratulation or self-selection...
...Why the great divorce between faith and work...
...Journalism and the sciences may have done a better job of articulating their missions and standards than middle managers, salespeople, or butchers...
...All practitioners should be able to state the core traditional mission of their own fields," say the authors, and it makes you wish you worked in a profession that had one...
...Good Work reminds us of the power of people banding together inside each profession to define what, at its best, it is...
...So how do we get more "good work...
...That torch-passing doesn't often happen in churches...
...It's almost medieval enough a notion for the churches to get interested...
...From the Busy Folks' Bible Class at George Babbitt's local church to J. F. Powers's Billy Cosgrove, we imagine that business-people inevitably get religion all wrong...
...This clash between the go-getters and the keepers of the flame emerges inside businesses too, but there the torch passes along to a new generation sooner or later-or the business goes under...
...Perhaps the age of guilds will return...
...Perhaps it's because working Catholics are getting all the support they need from the secular resources that exist...
...Many are good stories yet they are discussed and analyzed at far too great a length...
...Meanwhile, churches of almost every stripe are built to keep change at bay, even when it's the only way forward...
...So Faith, Morals and Money doesn't succeed as an enjoyable ethics casebook (if there is such a thing), or as a key-to-all-religions for business people...
Vol. 129 • June 2002 • No. 11
