The sacred and the profane are like oil and water—oil
for anointing and water for cleaning. The viability or value of the sacred does
not depend on denigrating that which is exogenous to it. In other words,
praising the sacred does not require trashing the world. Being in the world but
not of it does not imply that the world is necessarily bad. From this
perspective, the sacred and profane can both be viewed as viable in their own
rights, respectively. The inevitable distance that distinguishes them so
starkly is breached only with great difficulty, even if pressed out of sheer
practicality. For example, a theological interpretation undergirding a
religious organization’s food pantry can clash with a business calculus such as
would be held by an auditor pouring over the numbers and procedures. As
theology and business enjoy their own, sui
generis (i.e., of its own genus or type) bases of justifications or
rationales, unraveling a clash can be notoriously difficult for want of a
common denominator.
The full essay is at "Religion and Business Clash."
