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What used to be called the Business section in my local paper and in USA Today now called the Money section, and I suspect that these changes in nomenclature are not accidental but signal important shifts in postmodern business worth exploring. The turn from business to money signals a process of abstraction away from the details of business operations toward the pursuit of financial goals as ends-inthemselves. Countering this trend, three virtues embedded in the Incarnation can encourage Christian businesspeople to work toward the Kingdom of God through attention to faithful, embodied work, to loving relationships, and to a hopeful humility.
The rest of this paper fleshes out the statements just made in two major sections. In the first section of the paper, I describe three problems: 1) The shift from business to money reflects the rise of monetary and financial measures over other aspects of business, which in turn reflects the ways in which "cash values" have become the measure of worth in affluent societies.1 Although this problem has become increasingly apparent of late, Aristotle understood how the rise of money could lead to this outcome; thus, I will summarize his analysis briefly. 2) This shift intensifies the process of rationalization identified by Max Weber as a descent into the "iron cage" that reduces meaning and purpose in modern life to rational, instrumental means, to the exclusion of purposive ends.2 3) The shift from business to money suggests also that business managers might be learning to pursue goods external to the practice of business. As a result of the rise of monetary values and the growing emphasis on profitability, mangers are more likely to be distracted from the goods intrinsic to the success of their work. When tempted to pursue financial gain, business leaders will also be tempted to neglect the good of the business and of the larger community in which the business functions. They will attend less to their actual work than to the external goals of profits and shareholder values, whereas virtuous business requires attention to goods internal to the practice of good work-goods whose character it is to benefit all concerned.
In the second section of the paper, I argue that the virtues implicit in the Incarnation can offer potential...