The Rev. Robert Sirico, co-founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, discussed the intersection of business and faith in talk at Belmont University attended by more than 250 people Tuesday night.
“I can think of no better speaker to bring together the missions of Belmont’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Center for Business Ethics than Fr. Sirico,” said Dr. Jeff Cornwall, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship (pictured left to right with Dr. Patrick Raines, Dean of the College of Business, Fr. Sirico, and Dr. Harry Hollis, director of the Center for Business Ethics). “The mission of the Acton Institute is to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles, which is consistent with what we are trying to pursue with our Centers here at Belmont.”
Fr. Sirico spoke about how the entrepreneur, endowed with particular natural talents, is the primary agent of economic progress in the modern world, and that even though a free society is highly dependent upon the entrepreneur for its material existence, the vocation of business is relatively under appreciated within the religious community.
“Instead of praising the entrepreneur as a person of ideas, an economic innovator, or a provider of capital, the average priest or minister thinks of people in business as carrying extra guilt. Why is that?” Rev. Sirico has said. The consequences of a divorce between the world of business and the world of faith is potentially disastrous for both worlds, he says.
As president of the Acton Institute, Fr. Sirico lectures at colleges, universities, and business organizations throughout the U.S. and abroad, and his writings on religious, political, economic, and social matters have been published in such places as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, London Financial Times, and National Review.
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