Noted ethicist James Childs shows how businesspeople can bring their religious convictions to bear on business life and economics without being overbearing, provincial, or dogmatic. Tackling such nettling topics as competition, regulation, environment, risk, truth-telling, whistle-blowing, leadership, discrimination, affirmative action, and conflict resolution, Childs is neither preachy nor simplistic. This is the book that will at last help businesspeople to push "beyond conventional morality" and infuse character into corporate culture.

We live in an age of greed. Economic good times and the self-immolation of socialist alternatives have left capitalism unrivaled in popular minds as a way of life-a prized set of values and expectations. However, capitalism is not without its downside or its victims. Basic human services-and even religion-have become commodities. Corporations reorganize for short-term gain at the expense of employees-and of their own long-term viability. Increasingly, people see themselves not as citizens but as consumers. First World countries, 15 percent of the globe, account for 86 percent of private...

Bitter battles over the churches' stance toward its gay and lesbian members have tested the churches' fundamental orientation and even threatened to split whole denominations apart. The blessing of homosexual unions and ordination of gays and lesbians have proven to be special flashpoints at both local and national levels. Part of the widespread perplexity over the issues stems from their complexity. They involve questions not only of personal ethics and church polity but also of Christian history, conflicting readings of the biblical data, and uncertainty over basic anthropological...