A Virtuous Life in Business: Stories of Courage and Integrity in the Corporate World.

Readers familiar with Parker Palmer's much discussed book The Company of Strangers, which stressed the public nature and public obligations of the church, will find his latest volume much more personal in content and style. The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring (Harper & Row, $15.95, 160 pp.) is a creative byproduct of Palmer's attempt to make sense of the ancient tug-of-war between action and contemplation. He doesn't regard that relationship as one to be kept in balance like a seesaw or held in tension like a guy wire. Instead, Palmer likens it to death and resurrection, making the descent into contemplation sound, at the very least, downright dangerous. As Palmer tells us more than once, he has suffered lapses of terrible depression and can offer no guarantees for fellow travelers.

What he does offer is a model, an imitable way of using stories as the focus of contemplation, going over and over each one until its layers of meaning become clearer, if not fully clear. And what stories! There are a few select, still fresh tales by Chuang Tzu and Martin Buber, two familiar stories about Jesus (the desert temptation and the multiplication of the loaves), and a poem by the contemporary Guatemalan teacher Julia Esquivel called "They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection."

These stories are immediately engaging. Which one of us hasn't felt like the angel in Buber's story, who wanted to rid the world of human suffering and to that end had the temerity to ask God for permission to intervene? The result: false hopes and worse misery. Why? Because human suffering cannot and, here's the rub, ought not be eliminated in this world. How can we ever grasp the paradoxical truth about life--that death is the necessary prerequisite? Or about hope--that, although it is a gift, it is always hard-won?

Palmer's reflection on this same story also turns to the role of God, who, by allowing the angel to fail becomes an accomplice (or worse) to the disaster. Palmer concludes that God has "the same unfulfilled yearuings" as we do; that God "experiments, succeeds, fails, changes, learns, suffers," takes risks, and needs other people. This is hardly the traditional image of omnipotence and omniscience, yet it calls to mind Jesus' question to Peter--"Do you love me?"--and casts it as anything but rhetorical.

In his explication of "The Woodcarver," Palmer comes closer to the pressures of the active life most of us experience at work, though he exaggerates them. It would be hard to imagine a greater pressure (greater even than the dread deadline) to produce a satisfactory piece of work than the one the woodcarver faced: a royal command on pain of death. Yet it inhibits not one bit the carver, who, recognizing the stakes, takes deliberate steps to ensure his inner serenity. Only then does he find the perfect tree and create a much admired masterpiece.

I highly recommend A Virtuous Life in Business: Stories of Courage and Integrity in the Corporate World, edited by Oliver F. Williams and John W. Houck (Rowman & Littlefield, $18.95, 185 pp.), a selection of essays from a symposium sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business. Don't be put off by the book's excess of prefatory material, which ought to have been placed at the end. The book is not only valuable, it is readable and gets progressively better, featuring three sterling chapters toward the end. The first of these, chapter 6, is a straightforward account of the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989. This brief documentary is unadorned with editorial comment. Having positioned the essay midway through the book, after several essays applying "virtue ethics" to the problems of business, the editors must have felt that it needed no comment. It does stand alone and as it is can be used by teachers, discussion leaders, and environmentalists. Still, I found myself looking for an analysis of the ethical dimensions to the story.

Chapter 8, "The Business of Storytelling and Storytelling in Business," by Dennis P. McCann, is particularly ambitious. It contains a compelling critique of an earlier Houck and Williams book called Full Value, a groundbreaking look at Christian ethics and business, which McCann appreciates but also faults for its "evangelical bias." McCann doesn't stop there. He uses four contemporary secular narratives to demonstrate the more full-bodied approach to ethical issues he espoused in his critique. It sounds unnecessarily complicated, but he further compares these with classical examples--Mary's Magnificat, the Exodus, the City of God, and Augustine's Confessions. It's a bit like Alice traveling down the rabbit hole: the reader actually begins to see a much more complicated, and probably truer, picture than before the trip.

The final essay, "The Moral Theology of Silas Lapham" by Thomas L. Shaffer, uses an in-depth look at William Dean Howells's fictional character to expose two common mistakes among business ethicists: assuming from the start that business is morally destructive, and treating successful figures in business as members of a priesthood. Bemoaning the lack of business heroes, Shaffer describes Silas as one who practices the virtue of the "middle way." It is such a good read that one is drawn to Howells's own book.

William E. Diehi, a retired director of sales for Bethlehem Steel, is the author of The Monday Connection: A Spirituality of Competence, Affirmation, and Support in the Workplace (HarperSanFrancisco, $15.95,200 pp.) Diehi is a Lutheran layman who asks his readers to consider how the faith they express on Sunday is exercised during the week. This is what he refers to as the Monday connection. Work, as the author uses it, includes both paid and nonpaid activities.

The most valuable chapter is the one on competence. It begins with the true story of a veteran pilot who successfully landed a severely damaged plane. Even after nine passengers had been sucked through a hole in the plane's side as a piece of the fuselage ripped off in flight, the pilot skillfully saved the rest of his passengers. His response upon landing was cryptic, "I was just doing my job." That may seem excessively modest, an echo of what the woodcarver in Chuang Tzu's story said to admirers of his bell stand, yet Diehi makes it his bottom line: the first requirement of the Christian at work is to perform one's job as well as one can.

While Diehi frankly admits that not all work can be considered ministry, he argues that Christians ought to keep the list of forbidden occupations (drug trafficker, pomo queen, etc.) short. The goal is inclusive, to connect as much work as possible to one's life of faith.

Diehi describes the ministry of "presence" in the workplace, i.e., being attentive to the personal needs of colleagues and subordinates, which may sometimes lead to other actions: pressing for changes in personnel practices, such as discriminatory hiring and promotion. Overall, his approach is pragmatic and patient, urging nonconfrontational styles of persuasion whenever possible. Boldly, he acknowledges the issue of salaries, especially the enormous gaps between some workers, managers, and executives. He asks "Is Lee Iacocca's $16 million a year in compensation worth the equivalent of one thousand teachers or nurses?" fully aware that most executives would argue that it is.

Diehi emphasizes the positive potential of competition, arguing that cooperation is not always a superior value. His business experience leads him to acknowledge that government may have to oversee that competition is open and fair, but that does not weaken his endorsement of competition.

His most original idea is that churches sponsor support groups for members of various occupations. One format he has found helpful is a monthly meeting at which one member presents an actual case from the workplace for group discussion.

The Christian at Work in the World and The Spirituality of Work, two different series (the former are books, the latter pamphlets) published by ACTA, deserve mention. The Christian at Work series now has four volumes in print. The two I have read are collections of first-person stories. Of Human Hands (Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, ed., $8.95, 124 pp.) contains testimonies by members of various occupations, from computer developer to artist, and personal descriptions of how each tries to make the Monday connection. Many of the chapters are reprinted from a Commonweal series on faith and work that readers may remember. Caretakers of Creation (Patrick Slattery, ed., $8.95, 118 pp.), in the same format and style, is a collection by Christian farmers. The two latest volumes concern law enforcement officers and teachers.

The Spirituality of Work pamphlet series ($2.95 each, less than 50 pp.) now includes nurses, business people, homemakers, teachers, and lawyers. While each of these is written by one author whose aim is to link the sacred with the secular, anecdotes and quotes sprinkled throughout lend a personal touch. For example, "How can a lawyer ever find God in the rough and tumble environment of a county court system, a downtown office firm, an arbitration board, or amid the hundreds of phone calls and letters coming into the hectic office?" One lawyer sees the law as "a service profession," another entered it "in order to change society." This booklet brings up a host of other questions on the spirituality of practicing law, including the "mommy track" and the expectation of spending very long hours on the job if one is to succeed.

Tim Unsworth is responsible for Upon This Rock: The Church, Work, Money, and You (ACTA Publications, $8.95 paper, 119 pp.). While this presentation of the church's social teaching might seem elementary to some Commonweal readers, the book is intended to be used as a primer for adult education. Originally published as a series in Salt magazine, the book is a collection of articles, each followed by two pages of group discussion questions and suggested activities prepared by Jean Unsworth. The result is a lively, basic survey course.

What parishioner do you know who would race to pick up an article on usury? feudalism? or child labor? All these topics are treated here. Nevertheless, Unsworth's clarity and talent make the book's brisk surveys of history interesting, informative, and relevant. His views are balanced, too. For example, he gives the church mixed marks for its support of labor unions because he includes its resistance to organizing within its own institutions, yet he notes that the U.S. hierarchy has been more supportive than the hierarchy in many European countries.

Along with the important ideas and events set out in journalistic style, the book contains interesting trivia: Where does the word boycott come from? From Captain Charles Boycott, "a ruthless land agent in Ireland, who was ostracized by his serflike victims." What invention led to fixed working hours? The pendulum. Why did the garment workers withdraw from the CIO? John L. Lewis endorsed Willkie for president. What was Mother Jones's real name? Mary Harris.