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85 chapter฀6 The “Real World” of Business J. Michael Stebbins When I completed my doctorate in systematic theology at Boston College in 1991, I fully intended to spend the next few decades of my life teaching courses in that field in a university setting. As it turned out, the years I spent in graduate school prepared me for a somewhat different future. At its root systematic theology is the effort to produce a fully integrated Christian worldview. It is carried out from the perspective of faith (in Anselm of Canterbury’s famous twelfth-century formulation theology is found fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding”). Systematic theology takes as given the truth of the content of Christian faith and proceeds to ask, What is the meaning of what we believe? Beyond explaining how Christian doctrines are consistent with one another, its further goal is to integrate what Christians affirm through faith with whatever truth has been discovered in every field of human knowledge: history, literature, the arts, philosophy, the natural sciences, the social sciences, communications, and the innumerable varieties of common sense generated by people living and working in different times, places, and cultures. At its best, systematic theology attempts to embrace the world in its totality. It does so not by claiming detailed expertise about every aspect of every part of the universe—an obvious impossibility— but rather by finding intelligible connections between what is affirmed by faith and what is affirmed by reason, and by showing that, far from contradicting the truths of faith, anything known via science or any other kind of legitimate human knowing is compatible with, and indeed can be meaningfully related to, Christian doctrine. More than any other field of learning, systematic theology is concerned with the whole—everything that exists, Creator and creation, the ultimate whole of which all other wholes are only a part. University positions in systematic theology were not plentiful in the early 1990s. My first job after leaving Boston College was a two-year contract at Gonzaga University teaching Christian ethics, which had been my minor area of specialization in graduate school. During that time I was asked by Jim Connor to come periodically to the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington , DC, to discuss ways in which Bernard Lonergan’s theological method might serve as an interdisciplinary resource for the center’s programs, which dealt with a variety of social, political, economic, and ecclesiastical issues. Before long I was asked to join the Woodstock staff as a senior fellow and director of a newly launched program in business ethics. Its intended audience 86 J. Michael Stebbins was not university students but rather business people in the context of their everyday work lives. The program was supposed to use some of Lonergan’s insights in order to pursue a twofold goal: enhancing the ability of managers and executives to assess and guide the ethical performance of their organizations , and providing a framework that would allow managers and executives to explore the relationship between their faith and their work. In 2000, after six years at Woodstock, I returned to Spokane, Washington, to assume the directorship of the new Gonzaga Ethics Institute, a position I held until the end of 2008. In that role I often taught one to two courses per semester (both graduate and undergraduate) and pursued a variety of ethics projects and programs for both on- and off-campus audiences. So despite the fact that I earned my PhD in the field of systematic theology , the jobs I was hired for after graduate school had to do with ethics instead. Moreover, during that period the vast majority of participants in the various off-campus workshops, classes, seminars, and retreats I presented were people of a decidedly practical bent: managers and executives in business , the nonprofit sector, and government; members of the engineering and legal professions; leaders at the parish or diocesan levels of the Catholic Church (priests, deacons, religious women, lay people, and even a few bishops ); alumni of Jesuit high schools and universities; and ordinary Catholic parishioners . By and large these people participated voluntarily in the programs I offered, and they came because they wanted concrete guidance for the everyday choices they faced. They had little interest in the kinds of theoretical issues that tend to occupy academic ethicists and theologians. When I first began working in the area of business ethics, I had to enlarge my horizon. I knew something about ethics, but I knew only a...

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