In
this essay, I provide a synopsis of my booklet on spiritual leadership in
business. In the text, I suggest that while it may convenient in the business
world to conceptualize spiritual leadership as being essentially ethical in
nature, this convenient tactic does not do justice to the distinctly religious
basis and connotations of spirituality. By religion, I do not mean only theism,
or even just organized religion (i.e., religious organizations); rather, I have
in mind religious experience—whether through prayer, meditation, worship, or
another means that is oriented to yearning beyond the limits of cognition,
sentiment, and perception—as if an inherently limited human brain were
nonetheless “hard-wired” for beyondness itself whether or not a transcendent
religious object (e.g., a deity) exists. Rather than expunging spiritual from its native terrain and
reconfiguring it to fit within a secular context as ethics, we can relate the
religious sense of spirituality to the secular world of business with due
deference to their respective natures rather than muddling them into something
murky.[1]
The full essay is at "Spiritual Leadership in Business."
The booklet, Spiritual Leadership
in Business: Transcending the Ethical, is
available at Amazon in
print and as an
ebook.
1. By analogy, the notion that Jesus Christ is fully
human and fully divine—a theory coined at the Council of Nicea in 325
C.E.—involves taking the human as human and the divine as divine rather than
reconfiguring one term to suit the other. Just as one essence, or ousia, has a human element and a divine
element, spiritual leadership can be reckoned as having a religious and a
secular element. One essence can contain a notion of spirituality that is
religious in nature and a theory of leadership that is been derived in a
secular context.
