Introduction

Abstract

This special issue of BEQ presents diverse reflections on business practice from within Western patterns of theology and piety. Our goal is to help both academics and business practitioners understand the ultimate contexts in which religiously minded individuals construe their participation in business, and what these contexts then mean for moral reasoning. To keep the project manageable in scope, we have limited this foray to Western traditions, soliciting views from within representative denominations or viewpoints in Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity. If this sampling is well-received, essays representing other traditions—Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism—will be sought for a later issue.

We solicited essays from nine distinct perspectives, so as to present a cross-section of religious views. One of the questions we asked our contributors was: If a person in business were to take your tradition seriously, what does it teach him or her about God’s will for how business ought to be conducted? Here we were amply rewarded in our search for diversity. The nine contributions express a wide variety of religious beliefs and dispositions: from the fervent piety of evangelicals to the moral passion of modern Judaism, from the strict rules of traditional Judaism for containing greed to the exuberant permissions to innovate afforded by Roman Catholic social teaching, from a Lutheran focus on anxiety about security to an African-American struggle with an onerous historical legacy. (An even greater diversity is represented in the enormous recent anthology, On Moral Business, reviewed at the end of this issue.) The essays forcefully point to the importance of the quest to relate faith to business practice. They provide direction for those seeking to reconnect with their traditions. And to interested observers, they provide copious data for imagining how persons adhering to these traditions might interpret the business environment in which they work.