Welcome back to the Christianity and Business Podcast, an initiative at the RTW Dunham College of Business at Houston Christian University. I'm your host, Darren Scheer, and this is the show that helps Christian business leaders to integrate biblical values into business. On this episode, we're joined by Dr. Jason Stansbury, who's a contributor to the Center for Christianity and Business's Christian Business Review Academic Journal. I know you're all familiar with. Jason is the James and Judith Chamberry Chair for the study of ethics and business at Calvin University, which is a denominational university in the Christian Reformed Church in North America. He earned a PhD in organizational studies from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt in 2011. And before grad school, he worked as a systems analyst and then consultant in the Detroit office of Deloitte Consulting and graduated from the University of Michigan with honors in economics. And I know he's got a big dog in the big national championship fight coming up here pretty soon, at the time of this recording, anyway. Jason is a former executive director of the Society for Business Ethics, an International Association of Business Ethics Scholars, and received that organization's presidential award for service in 2023. And he's a native of Atlanta, lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife and colleague Marilyn, who is also a Deloitte alumna, who serves on the accounting faculty of the Calvin University School of Business, and just got to hear a fun story about how they met in the elevator at the Christian Business Faculty Association conference. Found out they were both Deloitte alums, and the rest is history. Jason, welcome to the Christianity and Business Podcast.
SPEAKER_00So glad to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation, Darren. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01Yes, sir. I've been looking forward to it. So, Jason, when did you first realize God wanted to be involved in your work in business and now teaching business?
SPEAKER_00Wow. I realized that in college. Certainly in ministry, but I I really appreciated that I heard over and over again, God has been putting his people in positions of influence since Daniel, since Joseph, and he's still doing it today on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley and in factories in Detroit and in oil fields in Texas and all over the world. And I said, sign me up for that. I want to be part of that program. And I came to understand that business is a place that Christians can be salt and light and have a good witness, even to people that would not otherwise darken the door of a church. So I was strongly motivated in my consulting career to be a person of good character, a person that did good work, a person that did good works. And so now, uh a couple decades later as a business professor, I am strongly motivated to help my students and my alumni uh grow into the character and the callings that God gives them as ethical leaders in business.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And I love the quote by Abraham Kuyper. And I and you could probably, I don't want to butcher it, but uh why don't you go ahead? You know the one I'm talking about. Um everywhere. Um I know the quote. Yeah, why don't you go ahead and say it?
SPEAKER_00Uh I I believe uh it goes that there is not a square inch of creation over which the Lord Jesus Christ does not cry mine.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And this is a distinctive of um Calvinism, really Calvin theology, where a lot of other denominations are uh just kind of figuring out that God wants to be involved in the marketplace. That God, you know, in a lot of ways created the marketplace going back to Eden. Um why is this such uh distinctive of um the reformed tradition?
SPEAKER_00Well, I I I think we tend to have a really high view of the of the sovereignty of God, right? That that the whole world is his, the whole world uh declares his glory, uh whether it realizes it or not, and the whole world is fallen because of Adam and Eve's sin, and frankly, because of the sins that we all continue committing to this very day. Uh and so you know, we we really experience this tension between God is so good and what God made is so good, and our experience of it, right, at the same time really shows us but something is really wrong. And that experience, right, uh is is every part of our lives, right? I mean, our our experience even in church, right? Our experience earning our living, our experience with our families and our friends, our experience going to a football game, right? Just you see part of how beautiful God's creation is, even as you see things that that just make you win, and you say, but it shouldn't be like that. And so I think that one of the things I at least have liked about this uh this tradition is that it has this broad view, right? If God is the creator and Lord of everything, then the there is no part of that creation that is not worthy of our attention and of our understanding. And we believe that there's no part of that creation in which God is not still sovereign and still at work according to his purposes. Now, then, what exactly those purposes are sometimes are not what our purposes are for that creation. Uh and so it's it's always important to be uh to be humble about what we think we can accomplish and about what we think God is gonna change, right? I mean, he's not he's not some cosmic Santa Claus that's there to fulfill our every wish for what we want the world to be, right? He has his plan. And so the challenge always is for us to discern what that is and get with his program. But uh but long answer to an excellent question. But yeah, why why is that such an emphasis? Because we believe in such a big God and we want to honor what he is doing.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and as you mentioned, there are many things that we see in the marketplace and and all aspects of life that just make us wince. And we know that sin is at the root of that. And so when we met at the Christian Business Faculty Association conference recently in Denver, you mentioned that you were studying this topic of sin and business. Um that's kind of a dark topic. Why did you pick that? I mean, I think it's pretty, pretty obvious, right? Because this is what is warring against uh God's um God's plan, his good plan for the marketplace.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, you know, and that's that's actually a question that uh that I've gotten uh a few times, right? Why, why sin? And I I picked it because sin really is the foundation of my understanding of what's wrong, right? What's morally wrong to think or to say or to do, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with the world. And you know, in the decades that I've been a Christian, that I've been going to church, I've I've read scripture and I've heard sermons and I've prayed prayers that all address sin. And and certainly uh certainly Calvinists are famous for sin, or perhaps Calvinists are famous for uh for our emphasis on sin. Uh but on the one hand, so that there's been this emphasis on, right, this is ultimately what's wrong. But as a as an academic business ethicist, right, as as someone who wants to tell my students what I wish someone would have told me before I went into consulting, well, I want to tell them what I wish I had known before they go into the world to hopefully be uh a good witness and a good influence. Well, I I've noticed in business ethics that we almost never talk about sin. We talk about things being unethical according to somebody's moral theory or deviant according to some intuition or illegal according to some legal precedent. And and then when you see sin mentioned, then often it's just kind of for rhetorical effect. Uh, or you see a conversation about sin stocks, for instance, right? Companies that that make porn or tobacco. Uh, and so it's it's been reduced down to this little sort of rhetorical flourish. Uh and I thought, you know, Christians in business, I think, need a way of taking sin seriously as a moral concept that does the work that some of the other moral concepts that are in circulation in in the business ethics world uh that does the work that those concepts can't really do. And so I really wanted to uh to understand, well, what what does the Christian tradition, and specifically my little corner of it in in Reformed Presbyterian Christianity, what what does it say about sin? And what might that tell us that's useful for the way we think about right and wrong in business?
SPEAKER_01So, how should Christian business influencers confront sin in the workplace?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think that um I think that one thing that is really important to understand about sin is that I'm actually gonna back up a little bit. Uh that there was uh a theologian in ancient Rome, right, uh Saint Augustine, uh Augustine of Hippo, uh lived in North Africa, and he made a really useful point many hundreds of years ago, and and he made the point that evil isn't really a thing in itself. Evil is always some good thing that has been warped out of shape by sin. And I and what he was trying to do when he approached that was people were saying, well, if if the God of the Christians is so good, then how did he create evil? There's clearly evil in the world, but you say he created everything, so maybe he's not so good. And so Augustine was trying to was trying to answer that, and he made the point, okay, God didn't create evil per se. God created all these good things, and then it is human sinfulness that has that has bent them out of shape. I think that's a really useful idea for our purposes here, and specifically to your question of, well, how should Christian business influencers uh confront sin? I think one of the first things to recognize is every sinful thing has some good thing at its heart. And so it's necessary for us to always confront sin with grace. And I think it's also important to realize that that's why every bad thing always has its apologists and its defenders, right, that are able to point to and say, but but but it's actually good because, right? And I think sometimes Christians get this really sort of uh dichotomous view of good and evil, and we forget that, right, and I'm gonna sound like a Calvinist again, right? We're totally depraved, we're evil too. We just don't know where our sins are sometimes, but it doesn't mean we don't have them. And then similarly, right, what whatever sinful thing, well, you know, the there's good in there because if it were completely evil, it would cease to exist. It can only exist because God created the good thing that's being worked out of shape. So, therefore, I think one important thing to recognize is identify what the good thing is, see the good potential that is no longer being realized because of the sin. That's rhetorically useful because it allows you to find some common cause, right? To to show some love, some interest in, some calling of the excellence out of whoever it is you're addressing about whatever sinful thing, right? And I think by creating that common ground, right, here is the fine thing, then that then gives you an opportunity to talk about, but then here is this other issue, right, that is keeping you from living into the freedom that you could otherwise have. Right? It's it's causing you to be unable to choose freely whatever else you might want to choose. And so I think that is where maybe the second piece, and it's the second piece is gonna sound kind of like the first piece, but the second piece is when you can see the good as well as uh as well as the evil in whatever sinful practice you you might want to try and confront, then the second thing is recognize grace comes from God. And so I think that one thing that uh we sometimes lose when we do business ethics is right, we want to talk about make better decisions, and we want to talk about have empathy, and we want to talk about all these things. And I also want to say, don't forget to pray. Don't forget to confess, don't forget to ask God to pour out his grace on yourself so that you can speak winsome words of of witness and of good counsel and of grace and of truth, and ask him to pour out this grace on whatever the problem is, and especially whoever might be caught up in that sin, that they may be free of this, of this thing that entangles them. And so I I think at once, right, we need to be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. And I think a lot of that innocence requires remembering dealing with sin is ultimately God's work. We cannot free ourselves from it, we cannot, by our own power, free anybody else of it, right? And so we have to ask God to work. But when when God works, wow. Yeah, He does some work.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00So that those would be kind of my two things is first recognize sin is everywhere, even in us, and that has to be confessed and lifted up. But but creational good is everywhere, and when you can recognize that, that's powerful for creating common ground, opening hearts and minds, recognizing what needs to be conserved and even called out, and then asking God to pour out his grace on them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, and I think that approach it definitely will make it much easier for us to hate the sin instead of hating the sinner, uh, because it it we're so quick to judge other people's motives and why they they do certain things, and immediately assuming the motivation itself is is inherently completely evil. Um, but there there is, as you said, there's there is some good, and you know, for example, you want to take care of the poor. Um, there's there's right and wrong ways to do that. You want to provide for your family, there's right and wrong ways to do that. Can you give us uh another practical application of what how this plays out in um in the workplace, in business in particular?
SPEAKER_00Uh and let let me ask maybe a clarifying question back at that. So uh your question a moment ago was about influencers. Um I can try and talk about that, or I can try and talk about sin in the workplace. How does it take shape? How do we fight it? Uh happy to address any of those. Which direction would you like to go?
SPEAKER_01Whichever direction you'd like to go.
SPEAKER_00All right.
SPEAKER_01You're the you're the expert. You're the expert.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well, then let me talk uh a little bit about the way sin kind of takes shape in the workplace. And I'd like to talk uh specifically about something that I have taken to call defilement. Uh this is uh this is an idea that I think often often gets lost uh when when people think about business ethics and bad ethics, because we like to think about bad ethics as a bad choice. And the the Christian witness for centuries has been sin isn't just a bad choice, right? Sin is a power. And when you sin, then it works your will. When when you sin, then you become less able to understand the good, you become less able to choose the good. And you know, and the reformers wrote about this. I mean, one of uh Martin Luther's most important books was on the bondage of the will, right? And that that's what he was talking about. And so I I think this understanding of sin as having an effect that means that future sins don't necessarily get easier to commit, but they get harder to resist. And I'm I'm borrowing that from uh Neil Planiga that wrote a great book on this back in 1995. I think that's an important thing to understand. And so when when we think about sin in the workplace, then it's important to realize that decisions that disrupt uh that disrupt good relationships with other people, good relationships with other organizations, good relationships with yourself, uh, all of which, of course, disrupt your good relationship with God, then these have follow-on effects because you can say something to someone that will mean that your relationship will never be the same again. When they are like, oh, really? I didn't know that's how you thought of me. Or you can uh you can treat a vendor or a customer in a way, right? For instance, if you don't respect or properly safeguard their intellectual property, right? And they they start finding out that some of their ideas are uh are out there in circulation, uh they're going to have to take measures to be less trusting in the future. Uh so I think it's important to realize that one thing that happens in sin in communities of people and businesses are communities of people, is that it contaminates things, right? It takes relationships that once worked because they were trusting, once worked because people understood and respected, even and even liked and enjoyed working with one another. And it it starts to turn them sour, right? It starts to turn them where you're like, I have to work with them again, right? It it turns them to where you say, if we're going to have to work with them again, then we're gonna need to figure out how to protect ourselves. Maybe we don't tell them what we have in mind further down the road. Maybe we don't give them access to some of our data. Maybe we set payment terms that are more in our own favor if we can't trust them to pay us sometime. And so you you see that this has kind of a snowball effect. And I think that's that's an important thing to understand is that uh is that sin has follow-on effects that make future sins uh more likely. And so, and I think we all have experiences within our relationships of right, something that you've said, something that you've done, it's never gonna quite be the same again, right? And it seems it seems to grow on itself. And so that I think is one thing that uh that's important to important to point out uh for business people, is right, it's not just an isolated bad decision, right? It instead it's it's something that you need you need help to be free of, and it's something that has cumulative effects over time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, because that's sin, it just deteriorates the trust, which is how the marketplace functions is on trust. We're we're we're told in First Corinthians 13 that love always trusts. So uh how can I always trust somebody? I yes, I need to, we would say that I love that person, but I don't trust them. And yet the scripture is saying that the God kind of Agape love always trusts. I mean, how do we how do we do that when there's sin in the equation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, and if if I could even springboard off of that, uh I'd like to talk a little bit about what what sin is in itself. And I think that can be that can be helpful for thinking about well, how how do we recognize it, how do we prevent it, and how do we deal with its consequences? And so um also in in my tradition, I I I mentioned uh uh Neil Clanning's book, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, great book on sin. And he characterized sin as, quote, a culpable violation of shalom. And then, you know, shalom is also kind of theological language, it's actually a biblical word, a Hebrew word, and it's the Hebrew word for peace. And all throughout the Hebrew scripture, right, the this term is used over and over again as describing God's intended way of living for his creation, for people, also for people's livestock, for people's communities, right? God wants people to be well. God wants people to live in relationships with others, not just that, right, not just that are fair, but also are enjoyable. God wants people to enjoy the world that He put them in. God wants people to actually like themselves. And I I think it's been fascinating over the past few years uh with the increasing prevalence of social media addiction and the increasingly increasing prevalence of uh of mental illness, seeing that people are losing their peace with themselves and people are getting where they don't like themselves. And that also is not shalom, it's not peace. And so I think it's important when we think of sin not to think of sin as breaking some rule, but instead to think of sin as right, God has an intention for his creation. And sin is when we act against that intention, right? Sin is when we take a relationship with the people that we work with, where right we can appreciate what's good about them. But but by taking advantage of them, or by lying to them, or by insulting them, or by you know telling their secrets to somebody else or right, all the different things that we can do, right, then that relationship of trust and affinity and appreciation and cooperation, right, gets bent out of shape a little bit. And right, once things get bent out of shape, they're liable to continue getting bent more out of shape. And so I think if if you understand sin that way, then you can start seeing where it happens in terms that in terms that aren't part of the Mosaic law from when scripture was first written down. So I think that's one useful way of of thinking about it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, that's well said. Well, let me talk about or ask you a question about uh the issue of competition. Is competition sinful? And and I'm gonna put it uh a little bit of a different way as well. Is competition Christ-like?
SPEAKER_00Interesting question. I uh I majored in economics in college, and so and so I'm a fan of competition, I'm a fan of competitive markets. I think that I think that competition is one kind of relationship that you can have with other people, is one kind of relationship that organizations can have with each other, and competition can be very useful for bringing the best out of people, right? And and causing people to to work hard, to be creative, to produce things that they wouldn't otherwise produce. So I think that competition is is potentially part of this this shalom order, right? This intended order of creation. It's one way of relating to others that helps us to meet our needs. So then is competition sinful? Well, of course it can be, just like uh just like all sorts of other things. It can be done well or or it can be done sinfully. And so when I think of competition that is not consistent, well, when I think of competition with another person, if if I and another salesperson uh both understand the terms of the competition, right? Customers come in, right? We try and meet their needs, they get to choose who they work with, right? Then I might start figuring out, right? Well, how do I listen well? What's my pitch? How do I consultatively understand the customer's needs, make recommendations that meet that needs, cultivate the long-term relationship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? I think there's a way for a competition to bring the best out of both salespeople. But someone can also choose not to compete on those terms to create more value for the customer, but instead try and figure out, right, how do I cause that customer to think that they don't want to work with the other salesperson? Right. How do I take advantage of what economists call asymmetric information, information that I have about the product or service that the customer doesn't have in order to extract more value from that customer?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00And so we we can start thinking of ways of competing that frankly are cheating. And right here in college football season, I think we uh we all are attuned to cheating, right? We all are attuned to uh watching on TV and saying that that's a dirty play, they shouldn't have done that. Uh and it it offends us, it intuitively offends us because God wrote the law on the hearts of the Gentiles. And so I think that competition per se is a good thing that can get worked out of shape by wrong approaches to it. And then one one thing about one thing about sin again is you might have a bad motivation, right? You might just really enjoy uh seeing the the fear or the humiliation in in your competitors' eyes when you beat them. Um I think that is also not shalom. But sometimes you don't necessarily even have to have a bad motivation to do a bad thing, right? You you might just come into come into a new job and start trying to figure out all right, how are things done here? And you watch the people around you and you see that right, the the way things are done is you don't tell the customer about these known issues with the product. And you start saying, okay, right, asymmetric asymmetric information, learned about that in econ class in college, got it. Right. And without necessarily having some kind of nefarious motive, right, you just you pick up that bad habit from your environment and it becomes part of you.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00And so when I talk about right defilement, about the fact that past sins accumulate and become generative of future sins, right? We can see, right, corporate culture can be that way, right? The the bad habits that some people have gotten away with, right, they're contagious. Other people say, oh wow, that worked for them. Maybe I should try that. Other people hear the justifications that they give, and they're like, Yeah, that that makes sense. We work really hard here, so we totally should. And I I remember a restaurant I worked at back in the day, and some of the servers uh late at night, end of the shift, right, kind of doing the cleanup, some of the servers would go pour themselves beers from behind the bar, right? And there's kind of this justification, well, I worked really hard, so I deserve this, and then that's contagious, and other people start learning those same justifications. And so that's you know, that's a self-reinforcing, uh, that's a self-reinforcing system. But I want to get back to back to the question, can competition is competition good or is competition sinful? And it can be both, but I think competition can drive people to acquire bad habits, just as competition can drive people to create value.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So, like so many things, it has to be approached with care.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I always try to reconcile these business matters with our calling to make disciples. Uh and and so, in what way does, for example, competition, how is that going to result in somebody becoming more like Christ? How is it going to result in me becoming more like Christ? And how's it going to result in the other person becoming more like Christ? You know, because did Jesus compete against the Pharisees, for example? I I would say so. Um, the goal wasn't to destroy the Pharisees, right? I mean, the goal was to make disciples, and the goal was to get people on uh uh to into the kingdom and to do things according to uh according to the kingdom, right? And and so there's definitely ways that we can compete that are um, for example, you you win a game and then you put out all this nasty trash about your opponents and you know, dog them, drag them through the mud. That's not making disciples, but like if they see you win and you conduct yourself with nobility, you help them to elevate their game, I think they're probably gonna look at you and say, Yeah, I I'm not happy that I lost the game or lost a sale or whatever, but I'm better now because of having competed against that particular opponent. I mean, does that is that a right way to think about it?
SPEAKER_00I I think that's a a good way to think about it. I I think you know, competition is one place that we can bear the fruit of the spirit and hopefully show ourselves to be Christ's disciples. I I think you ask a really interesting question when you ask, so is competition Christ-like? And when I think about discipleship and growing in Christ-likeness, then among other things, I think about becoming really humble and discerning about what am I called to and what am I not called to. And Jesus was really discerning about what he was and was not called to. And he would say, It is not my time, right? And sometimes the crowds thronged to him and he would do miracles and healings, and sometimes the crowds came and he disappeared because God was calling him to something else at that time. God was calling him into his presence to walk up the mountain and get some pure time alone with his father. And so I want to bring that back to competition and say one thing that competition will teach you sometimes is this might not be your calling, right? Uh, you know, I ran cross-country back in high school. Uh, that was fun. I still like to run for fitness. I was not very fast. I figured out, right, in in the competition of trying to get uh a position on an NCAA squad, I was going to lose. God was not calling me to run in college. And so I think that one thing about competition is like it'll teach you what you're not gifted at. It'll teach you what God has not prepared for you to do. And sometimes it's necessary for us to uh to take that feedback that God has prepared other good works for us to do. God has prepared other ways for us to make our living and enjoy who He's created us to be. And competition is a useful way of figuring that out. Of course, it also hurts to lose. And sometimes people like will refuse to take that lesson and will find ways to not lose, even though really they don't have what it takes to compete, and that drags us back into the whole defilement of cheating.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But I I'd like to also take that in maybe a slightly different direction and talk about one idea that that I've found helpful as I've been thinking about sin. Uh, and that's uh that's the idea of idolatry. And yeah, that that's also something that we've all heard a lot of sermons about over time, and right, the the Bible talks a lot about how terrible idolatry is. And oftentimes when I've heard sermons on idolatry, they pretty much amount to Christians shouldn't like anything too much. And I don't think that's really the right understanding. And I think C.S. Lewis made a really good point that Christians' problem is not that we like things too much, it's that we have too little passion for God and what for what he's doing. So I'd like to try and maybe understand idolatry uh in ways that are not quite so magical like they were in scripture, but instead think of idolatry as uh as a technology of the self, right? That that's a word that a postmodernist philosopher used uh used to describe the the phenomenon of saying there's its practice, there's this discipline. And if I submit myself to that discipline, then I can use it to get some control over myself and to achieve some things. It gives me freedom to achieve things. And then as I achieve those things, then other people are going to like recognize my accomplishment and maybe come along and maybe imitate, and then I have status in the group, and right, that this is a valuable thing. Uh, for instance, I said, right, back in the day, I ran cross-country. I'm still a runner, I'm still not fast. Uh, running can be that, right? And a lot of people who run enjoy going fast, but that's not really why they do it, right? They run so that it can help them to eat right, so that it can help them to remember to get to sleep, so that they can remember to stretch. It helps to bring along this whole set of good habits that help you to just sort of be healthier and happier. And so, right, running is a discipline that gives you mastery over yourself. And then as you get good at this discipline, then right, you might find other people that you like to go run with, right? And then you might get on Strava and you start posting your workouts, and then you see your friends' workouts, right? And you're all comparing and it's it's fun, and you start getting status in that community, and you start running races, and you got your finishing times and and all this stuff, and it's wonderful, right? And I think in business, we experience something very similar, right? When when we care about, when we care about profitability, when we care about customer satisfaction, when we care about innovation, right? These these are all disciplines, good things that cultivate in us perseverance, creativity, courage. And I think competition, really, with whether the competition is for profitability or for customer satisfaction or for innovation or for quality or or et cetera, right? I think all of these are different sort of versions of this competitive habit forming. But here's the normal side. When you have one of these habits, are you using it or is it using you? If it's using you, then it's an item. If it's using you, and if if you're saying, and runners talk about the church of the of the long run, right? Because Sunday mornings, if you're a distance runner, Sunday morning is one of your best times to get out and go for a long run because people have so few obligations on Sunday mornings and there's not too much traffic on the roads, and it's it's great. Except that if you're a member of the church of the long run, then you're probably not a member of a real church. And so that is an example of right, that habit, that technology of the self using you to take you away from some other things that really probably ought to be your priority. And then you learn the satisfactions and you build the relationships and it can warp your will progressively in that direction. And I think in business, similarly, competition can bring out the best in you, but the competition for equality or the competition for customer sat or the competition for innovation, right, can also become a really tough master and demand more and more of you, and demand your Wednesday nights, and demand your Sundays, and demand your attention, and you're thinking about it when you should be listening to your spouse or you should be listening to the sermon, right? And you try and pray and you're still thinking about, right, whatever that thing is at work, because competition demands that you steal a march on your competitor. And so I think that is competition Christ-like Jesus was willing to participate in some of the practices of his day, right? He went and he went and dined with people, but at the same time, he also subverted them a little bit, right? He he wasn't willing to just take everything uh as it was given, right? He made sure they weren't using him, he used them for his father's purposes. And so I think can competition be Christ-like? I think if we are willing to participate in the competitions that we're part of as business people in a way that asks, right, how do I use it without letting it control me? Can I say no to it because it's Sunday and I'm going to church, right? Or because no, that's cheating, that's dishonest, and it does not honor my father. Right. When you can say no to it, when you can tweak it a bit for your purposes, I think that's where you are competing in a Christ-like way and not bowing to the idol.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well said, Jason. There's so much more I want to talk to you about. Uh, we'll have to do it on another episode and have you back on. But uh before we sign off here, anything you want to say to folks about how they can hear more from you? Anything you want to promote?
SPEAKER_00Wow. Uh well, definitely a fan of the Christian Business Review. I think that is uh is a great enterprise, and there are so many good articles in there. Uh I happen to have one from back in 2018, but uh every issue I think is definitely worth looking at. I'm also a fan of the Journal of Markets and Morality, which is published here in Grand Rapids by the Acton Institute. Uh so I would say check out the Journal of Uh Markets and Morality as well. And then there's uh there's another journal that uh I sit on the editorial board of called the uh Journal of Religion and Business Ethics. Uh that one's a little more academic. It's published out of DePaul University, uh, but it's also a free resource. And I think there's a lot of good, uh a lot of good articles on there with, I think, some really helpful and edifying thoughts. So I would commend any of those three resources to uh to all your listeners.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. Well, Jason, so glad we got to do this, and again, looking forward to doing it again uh sometime in the near future. Um trust your year is off to a great start. Have a great semester, and thanks so much for taking time out to help our audience grow today.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Darren. It's been a real privilege.
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