Charles Dickens, Learning from the Past, Leaning  into the Future | David Miller
Channel: Faith@Work Summit
Date: 2015-01-25

In 1863, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come — a morality tale critiquing the dark side of industrialization; raising questions of the gap between rich and poor, working conditions, generosity, and even medical care. In 2014 Dickens’ questions remain relevant as we assess the faith at work movement. We know its past. At this conference we reflect on its present. But where is it going? Is Faith@Work just a fad that will soon run its course? Or, is it a bona fide movement with staying power? What are the new issues it will need to respond to? Is it just a thin religious version of pop psychology designed to dampen our guilt, justify our successes and excesses, heal our failures, and fill our sense of emptiness and purposelessness at work? Or, is there something theologically significant, distinctive and robust that has the potential to shape and inform daily work, organizational life, and the marketplace at large? Will the faith at work movement eventually fail and recede, or will it someday be able to echo Tiny Tim’s words, “God bless us, everyone!”?
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David Miller 

(BA, Bucknell; MDiv, PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is Director of the Princeton University Faith & Work Initiative, Lecturer Department of Religion, and President of The Avodah Institute. He teaches business ethics drawing on the resources of the Abrahamic traditions. He is the author of God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement. Before his Ph.D., he spent 16 years in business, including eight years with IBM, and eight years in London as a senior executive in international finance. David also serves as an advisor to CEOs and executives on ethics, values, leadership, and faith at work.
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Reflect/Respond

How do you personally integrate your own faith at work?

How might your involvement in the faith at work movement shape and inform the nature and culture of the company you work in or lead?

What do you see as the challenges and possibilities of the faith at work movement, in an increasingly religiously diverse workplace and global economy?
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Resources

Kenneth Hopper & William Hopper, The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Hendrik Kraemer, A Theology of the Laity (Westminster Press, 1958)
David Miller, God at Work: The History & Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (Oxford, 2006)
Ian Mitroff & Elizabeth Denton, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America (Wiley, 1999)
Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton, 2005)
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Faith@Work Summit 2014 by fwsummit.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.fwsummit.org.

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