Business educators meet, focus on Ignatian values

In my 25 years as a global consultant I have found spirituality alive and well in global executives. European executives are more inclined to talk about it explicitly. US evangelical execs are more likely to talk about it but speak more about their success being blessed by God than of any preferential option for the poor - though now many evangelical pastors are speaking up in that vane. I suggest the Jesuits find and involve these spiritual execs as mentors for their students. Incidently, a colleague in the UK and I did the Creighton online Ignatian retreat yearly to both our benefits. For those students who could benefit, it is an excellent formation tool.

Fr. Spitzer's comments are not those of a good Catholic. His word's would be FAR better if he had said, "We want them to be excellent leaders who have expertise in management, accounting, marketing, investments, finance. economics AND THE FOLLOWING OF JESUS CHRIST IN EVERY ASPECT OF THEIR LIVES."

Until that happens I feel truly sorry for His students.

Del Nelson

The United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus to further prop up the economy after the $787 billion rescue package launched in February, an adviser to President Barack Obama said. Wage restraint remains one of the main hopes for rectifying Britain’s budget deficit, despite opposition to a pay freeze from public sector unions. These days, almost anytime someone borrows to fund a business, buy a car or get a mortgage, the debt gets repackaged into a security that can be bought or sold like a stock. But critics say abuses in the securitization market helped bring about the housing meltdown. Consumerism and materialism have been the new religions in this country for years. The Making Home Affordable Modification program has a $75 billion commitment to support online cash loans modifications so that up to 3 to 4 million borrowers at risk of foreclosure can keep their homes.

Θ

The last part of the article is really interesting and the people from the BASQUE COUNTRY are really cool!

In adition the GLOBAL BUSINESS INCUBATOR model should been implemented in our universities.!

-WHEELING JESUIT UNIVERSITY- Wheeling-West Virginia- -- www.wju.edu --

-DEUSTO JESUIT UNIVERSITY-Bilbao City-Basque Country- -- www.deusto.es --

-GAIA-Cluster of Telecomunications of the Basque Country -- www.gaia.es --

More problematic to me is that some Catholic Universities have become,
in the generic, the business education venues of choice for those whose
interests are wholly secular and in the pursuit of personal wealth.

Many such institutions offer extraordinarily expensive MBA programs; they
put tremendous energy and resources in promoting and conducting such
programs.

"To what end?" we must ask ourselves. If 9 of 10 students in such programs
are simplly there to get an MBA and a promotion to middle management, is
a Catholic institution "on mission" when conducting such programs?

And, far from serving to keep tuition in, say, direct theology and ministry
curricula down, the rising tide of business education costs seems at many
Catholic colleges and universities to float all of the tuition boats in an
upwards direction.

The same might be noted for other "high financial value upon completion"
curricula, such as law and medicine.

Isn't something wrong when one has the choice between a $50,000 MBA which
leads to a $150,000-plus salary in management at a Fortune 500 company or a
$50,000 D.D. leading to a $20,000 (if one is lucky) job in a parish or
diocese?

One would expect the costs of Catholic University matriculation to run
heavily in inverse proportion to the graduate's expected ability and
intent to add value to the coming Kingdom, as opposed to the mercenary
one.

It isn't clear that that is often, or even frequently, the case.

What’s wrong with this scenario? With the corporate business model assumed here? Where’s the sensitivity to nature? To “Divine Instance” in cosmic consciousness?
http://www.secondenlightenment.org/DIVINE%20INSTANCE,%20Purpose,%20Symbi...

Religion (moral sensitivity) has been uprooted from its Earth/ cosmic connections and appropriated in mercantile interests. It’s gone corporate, commercial. It’s intensely male-exclusive, schizophrenic, politically partisan. It’s an imposter. It’s a public liability.

Religion has turned its face from wisdom’s natural way, from knowledge, understanding, counsel, fortitude, piety and fear of the Lord. Religion has set its face against evolving consciousness and made itself a fixation against natural authenticity. Male-dominated religion violates its natural roots, ignores divinity connections in nature and sacrileges relationships. It ignores mutuality, complementarity and subsidiarity. Its communication is distrustful; its consciousness is selectively disordered; its conscience is arbitrary.

The intelligent design of the Sacrament of Natural Order reveals its wisdom gradually in quantum packets. Institutional religion has arrogated itself above commonsense and prided itself above the belief that the anecdotes of wisdom originate in the experiences of nature, and that wisdom compels fidelity to nature. Wisdom is incremental—the outcome of moral purpose, of evolutionary consciousness, of intentional symbiosis.

In “The DREAM of the EARTH”, Father Tom Berry says: “Professional education should be based on an awareness that Earth is itself the primary physician, primary revelation of the divine, primary scientist, primary technologist, primary commercial venture, primary artist, primary educator, primary agent in whichever activity we find human affairs”. Nature is “PRIMARY SCRIPTURE”, the authentic and primary teacher of religion. Nature is universal church, Primary Church.
http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=6577

Jesus retreated to a high place with Peter, James and John and revealed to them his insight of divinity, his mission and message of universal love. This first Christian hierarchy of three glowed with excitement over the illumination of his divine mission. Jesus made sense of the prophets of Jewish history, so much so that it was as if the prophets were there on the spot with them. So, what did Peter want to do? He wanted to institutionalize the experience; he wanted to build a monument of stone on the spot to the memory of the prophets and to their experience of transfiguration. But Jesus took strong exception to the idea.

When Jesus died, it seems that the lesson of Transfiguration was lost. The “hierarchy” returned to its monument-building instincts and began the process of institutionalizing the teaching and mission of Jesus. Not, I think, what Jesus wanted or expected. The problem with religion today is that it still fails to understand that the illumination of each moment is a stepping stone to further enlightenment, not another boulder to be cement to other boulders to make a wall or institution to house and fixate memories. Corporate religion makes building stones out of religious insights (dogma) and mortars them together, one on top of the other, on the misguided presumption that consciousness can be fixated in its illumination of relationships, which necessarily change in context and consequence.

Purely and simply, religion is about ever changing relationships, which pertain to every aspect of the human condition in the contexts of nature and each other. All relationship is local, which means, familial, communal, and bioregional. Religion obliges universal fidelity to primary family, primary community, and primary bioregion. The bioregionally diverse webs of flora and fauna are the sustainable means of food and fiber that humans need to self-accommodate. Natural diversity is the singularly accessible resource for a sustainable future. Waste of species, of environment, genetic modifications, hybridizing, etc, introduce cumulative risks and certain unsustainable consequences.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976943890

The overreach of Colonialism, and now of Globalism, continues to reduce nature to a moral/ mortal wasteland. Christian Mission needs to be aware of, and wary of, the moral/ mortal devastation caused by the mindless corporate exploitation of global people and resources. This is the warning of Missiologist Stephan Bevans, SVD. Stephen Bevans writes about “New Evangelical Vision and Mission” in the DIVINE WORD Missionary Magazine, Summer 2002 and Winter 2002, P.O. Box 6099, Techny, IL 60082-6099. Dr Bevans, is the Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD, Professor of Mission and Culture at the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago.

"On the one hand, Dr Bevans acknowledges the past errors of missionaries being in the role of serving colonialism, and on the other hand, the future risk associated with transnational corporations and globalization. He writes, “The modern missionary era was in many ways the ‘religious arm’ of colonialism, whether Portuguese and Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth Century, or British, French, German, Belgian or American colonialism in the nineteenth. This was not all bad — oftentimes missionaries were heroic defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples…We find ourselves today, however, in another equally ambiguous context…the phenomenon of globalization poses a threat that is in many ways much more dangerous than the old colonial order. Particularly, in the economic realm, global corporations are ruthless in their search for profits and expansion, and while many are benefiting, the poor of the world are becoming poorer and more desperate."

“The transformation that has occurred within the church over the past four decades (following the Second Vatican Council) is the changed condition that gives new insight into the evangelical mission to the world. Divine Word Missionary Bevans (who served in the Philippines from 1972 to 1981) identifies five “important shifts” that have brought about this new insight.

"The first shift is “from expansion to communication”. In conjunction with colonialism, the preaching of the Christian gospel is now globally widespread. Christianity has shifted its population center from the “North” to the “South”… “Brazil, for example, is now the largest Catholic country in the world, and the world’s fastest growing church is the church of Africa.” Further expansion, as with the followers of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, will continue to be “slow and difficult… The missionary era just now beginning is communication.”

"The second shift is “a new motive: from the mission of the church to the mission of God.” Past emphasis of mission engagement was on “obedience to Christ’s command.” Trinitarian theology, as it has been developed in recent decades, makes it clear that God “is the real missionary…Mission is not merely something that God does; mission is who God is…Mission” is now not so much what “church is commanded to do, [rather] it becomes [is] the church’s very essence.”

"The third shift is the “new breadth: from mission as one task to mission as many tasks.” “While…the direct proclamation of the gospel” is the “permanent priority of mission (RM 44)”, it now includes persistent focus on the every day Christian life of the people and the community’s efforts to make real the whole church’s commitment to justice and peace on behalf of all peoples, including “commitment to ecological concerns.”

"The fourth shift: “from missionary specialists to missionary Christians.” Missionaries serve not to transplant a new culture (colonial) and/ or a new nationalism but to blend the message of Jesus into the lives of people where they are. Mission witness is to personify Jesus’ presence. In such witness local churches develop mission focus and become missionary churches, for “missionary activity is a matter for all Christians (RM 2). Every parish is a missionary parish.”

"The fifth shift is the “new context: from colonialism to globalization.” The missionary is to be neither the arm of past colonial overreach nor a new arm for the overreach of transnational corporations. The communication tools of modern technology, for example, may be useful to facilitate the missionary’s work, but the missionary’s work remains “to preach the gospel and promote the values of God’s reign.” The problem is the real threat of harm that globalization poses to the poor of world, and to missionaries in being identified with globalization even as they were with colonization.

“All missionaries, all Christians, like Jesus, should relate to others solicitously and not arrogantly, compassionately not pretentiously, altruistically not opportunistically, for such behavior is conducive to personal/ social justification, salvation, peace and civility. The Christian/ Human Mission is indiscriminately universal and individual, characterized in authentic relationships and service of people to each other and to life on Earth.
From RELIGION & CIVILITY, pp 287, 288, http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=24059

I like Father Spitzer's "four levels of identity in leaders." It reminds me of Lawrence Kolberg and Carol Gilligan's six stages of moral development and the questions that go with each stage, for example, Stage One - What can I get away with?, Stage Two - What's in it for me?, going all the way to Stage Six - What do I believe is the truly right thing to do?

Fr. Max Oliva, S.J.
Author of "Beatitudes for the Workplace"
(Novalis - Canada; 23rd Publications - U.S.,
May 2009)

An excellent article. We need more business leaders with the transcendent values Fr. Spitzer speaks about. As a graduate of Gonzaga with an MDiv and helping at Seattle University, I can testify to the remarkable leaders these Jesuit schools send out into our world.

History shows that the institutional church accommodates to the secular order. It tends to imitate “the patterns of governance in the secular city”. In the present time the multi-national corporations “shine as tempting images for neatly ordered efficiency”. This temptation is “to be watched and resisted”. (Ladislas Orsey, “In Dialogue”, AMERICA, A Jesuit Magazine, Vol. 183, No. 17, Whole No. 4508, November 25, 2000, pg. 15).

The reality is that the institutional Catholic Church of today is even now infected with a mentality of imperial corporatism that presumes itself to be exclusively God-ordained to “dispense the economy of grace”. In its institutional description of purpose it uses commercial terminology as if God’s grace were money in the bank. Church mercantilism is patently fixated in the hierarchical structure, which purports to “market” grace on behalf of God to grace-lacking lay people.

Individually, like Jesus, each of us must make the threshhold decision which value-system we choose to identify with. Will we choose to be dominators, comptrollers of commodities, and enslavers, or people of love who labor in the company of the marginalized in order to affect a more just society which responds to the moral imperative of seeing every person in equal standing before God and man, with right of equal access to life’s necessities?

We should consider the nature of the “divine dispensation of grace” in paradigmatic nature. Throughout virtually the whole history of the evolution of life, it is the experience of life that every minutest component of life’s web is born from, is sustained in, and returns to the economy of life’s essential continuity. Only in the thinnest skin of recent history has self-conscious humankind departed from this essential economy and presumed the libertarian arrogance of ignoring nature’s time-proven strategy and of choosing to exploit network life in self-interest and without consideration for the consequences to other life and to future life.

We might well ask, “What is the point of this?” The point is: that we individually and as a nation are at the threshold of critical choice—the same choice confronting Jesus after his forty-day fast in the desert. One choice before him was to join the cultural class of Roman Judea’s oligarchy (temple/political/business structure) and pursue positions of prestige, authority, self-aggrandizement and control over resources and people.

An alternate choice is go in a different direction and choose a future that identifies with the poor and the outcasts, with the slave class, and work to bring about a more equitable social structure, and treat the order of nature with respect and restraint. The latter, as we know, is the choice Jesus made, and it is the choice he asks his imitators, “Jesuits”, who would claim to be his followers, to make.

In his choice, Jesus rejected the corporate culture of empire—profiteering; empire-building would not be an option for his true followers. But his twelve, and especially, Peter, couldn’t grasp this radically different messiahship. To understand the corporate empire is to understand what we as Church are called not to be and not to do.

I suspect there is room for internal reflection here. Visiting Marquette University, one can't help notice the attention and value given to the men's basketball team while the women's team languishes not only in attention but also is financially underserved by a university that charges up to $40,000 a year in tuition, fees, room and board. Ignatian values? Counter cultural? Not possessed by one's possessions? Hmm.

While it is said “comparisons are odious”, it is by way of comparisons that we learn. For example, perhaps the most convincing lesson why we need religion comes from the experience of irreligion. When we behave irreligiously toward each other we become truly odious to each other.

The “analogies of reciprocals” reveal the affirmative face of the coin of learning what religion is. Reciprocal accountability affirms the way of symbiosis, while disregard for reciprocal accountability thrusts upon us the experience of frustrated relationships and the frustration of religious accountability, what is “irreligion”. http://www.secondenlightenment.org/Reciprocity,%20accountable%20culture.pdf

Everything we know and believe about God is by way of “analogic consciousness.” The greatest teacher of religion, of God, for all times, is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the carpenter’s son. An answer to the question “what good can come from Nazareth?” is: the supreme lesson that religious learning is by way of analogy, by way of parables and comparisons.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (a people regarded as insignificant) teaches by way of comparison, i.e., comparing the insignificant Samaritan to priests and the “significant”, and the disregard of the “significant” for the plight of the person in deathly peril from thieves in contrast to the regard of the insignificant Samaritan who rescued the sorry victim and returned him/her to health.

Today the sorry victim of thievery is nature. Where are the priests, the bishops, the preachers and the corporate significant? Who are the thieves? We, who disregard the vulnerability of nature and continue to rob her of the largesse of her vitality.

Analogic learning exposes to us in our behavior and belief who we really are. The leadership of institutional religion and of corporate exploitation, and us — all of us sinners — the “significant” ones, still exhibit disregard for nature, disregard for the “insignificant.”
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977775554 http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=24059