Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Godly Work

Came across this article on Forbes online:

Work is about the creation of value." this is a nice quote. If pressed, you might guess it was a pet phrase of Peter Drucker or Jim Collins or some other famous business guru. But it was popularized by Dallas Willard, a philosophy professor. Willard taught at the University of Wisconsin and later ran the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California during the early 1980s. He is on sabbatical now and spends most of his time writing and occasionally lecturing on a vexing subject: How should people who call themselves Christians conduct their lives in the secular world? This is a good question and a very serious matter for people of any faith.

Most pastors, priests, rabbis and imams who speak about faith and work make a terrible hash of it. Listening to them is like hearing a eunuch lecture on sex: He may have studied the topic but really knows little about the mechanics. Worse, I have run into countless clergy across all faiths who actually despise business. They think businesspeople--with all their buying, selling and profiting--have ineluctably compromised their souls, if they haven't yet sold them to the Devil. A religious leader's snipes are familiar to anyone who has spent time in a church, synagogue or mosque: Businesses exploit the weak. They are driven by greed. Their advertisements inflame our baser instincts, such as pride, lust, envy and greed.


Read the rest here.

1 comment:

Adam Gonnerman said...

I'll take a look at the rest of the article soon. Personally, I don't hate business. I see business in a generally better light than government, though I see both as necessary and not especially "evil" in and of themselves. The greatest evil I've seen was in Brazil where small business is stifled and big business is as corrupt as the politicians that let things slide for money.