Soundbites

Commerce 101 for clerics

Shortly after the financial crisis of 2008 a priest told James Martin, “Capitalism is dead.”

Martin, who had left a job at GE Capital to enter the Jesuits, responded by asking the priest if he could still go to the corner and buy a hotdog.

“Yes,” he said.

“That’s capitalism,” Martin said. “It’s not dead.”

While many clerics and sisters have founded and run schools and hospitals, many more are at sea when it comes to financial practices, Martin writes in America, a Jesuit magazine (“Why the church needs business”). “The same church that has (rightly) spoken out so forcefully on the excesses and the limitations of capitalism desperately needs some capitalistic skills.”

Martin offers two reasons why Catholic clergy know so little about business.

First, many clerics who now run the church entered their religious orders right out of college or high school and “did not have the important experience of having to earn a paycheck, balance a checkbook, manage employees, read a balance sheet, invest in the stock market, and so on.”

Second, business never became part of their education.

What would Martin change about religious training?

“Drop a year of philosophy and add a year of business,” he writes. “When you think of the likelihood that a Jesuit will one day be running a parish or school, Adam Smith is more important than Immanuel Kant. Pity the priest who finds himself presented with a sheaf of financial statements, without knowing what a debit or credit is. Pity the sister who finds herself running a school without ever having hired (or, more importantly, fired) a single person.”

Martin adds that church fraud and embezzlement occur because “pastors often rely on a longtime business manager, almost blindly, and they themselves may not have the education to know when they are being duped.... Anyone running a business who does not know what a bank rec is shouldn’t be running a business. This is not simply good management but good stewardship.”

Overcooked

How is it that at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoning the kitchen, handing over the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry, we began spending so much of our time thinking about food and watching other people cook it on television? The less cooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more that food and its vicarious preparation transfixed us.

Our culture seems to be of at least two minds on this subject. Survey research confirms we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals every year. The amount of time spent preparing meals in American households has fallen by half since the midsixties, when I was watching my mom fix dinner, to a scant 27 minutes a day.... And yet at the same time we’re talking about cooking more — and watching cooking, and reading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that we can watch the work performed live. We live in an age when professional cooks are household names, some of them as famous as athletes or movie stars. The very same activity that many people regard as a form of drudgery has somehow been elevated to a popular spectator sport. — Michael Pollan in Cooked

A natural?

Saying that someone is a natural is usually meant as praise, but it is in fact disrespectful to the people who have worked to master any discipline, be it music, literature, medicine, or sports. No one can control what they are born with, but they can control how hard they work. The fact is that talent counts for almost nothing in the absence of hard work. Plenty of gifted athletes never make it. Other guys work their way to the top with very modest gifts. Whether you are talented or not, the only thing that is going to get you where you want to go is hard work. — Hockey legend Bobby Orr in Orr: My Story

Empty inbox

I look at my inbox, God, and am amazed at what I see: how clean, how organized, how spare. It is a small thing, God, but it feels like a little miracle, a breath of fresh air. Thank you for this feeling of accomplishment, this relief at a fresh start. Thank you, God, for this brief moment of orderliness in a cluttered world. — Julie Rattey in Pocket Prayers for Young Professionals

New China

People are very excited about Africa. It’s the new China. You’ve got demonstrable improvement in political and corporate governance, and you’re starting to see some fairly major growth in GDP. The possibilities there are very attractive. — Gavin Graham, co-author of Frontier Markets for Dummies, in the Globe & Mail

Spinoffs

I discovered centrifugal force the day I drove my two-wheeler through a puddle and got a streak of muck splattered up my back. I was seven or so, and it would be years before I’d learn in physics class that what I had experienced was centrifugal force in action. Later in life I found that good deeds are like centrifugal force. They shoot out from the hub and touch everything. Do something good — in your workplace or community — and you’ll see how it cannot be contained. It will always spin out circles of more virtue. — Bartholomew Gideon