« Going Public with a New Conviction »

When I presented the paper on God’s economy at the Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination conference, I arrived at an important moment for me because I was going public with new thinking for me. I was testing on others what I had come to believe about how economics and religion mixed. I was rejecting the idea that religion’s contribution to business was confined to instilling ethics and morality. I was advocating that religion has a point of view about which business model and which model of economics we choose. It was the most forceful, public declaration that I had made on such issues up to that point. 

I felt sweaty and excited. I was animated and anxious. When my 20 min. timeslot was up, I yielded the mic to the next related presenter, a professor from a business department, and benefitted from his presentation on entrepreneurs as prophets. A new thought.

A few weeks following the conference I was pleased that Jamie Gates and Mark Mann, two who produced that conference, selected my paper to be included in a book they planned, entitled Nurturing the Prophetic Imaginagion. That book is now being published and will be available soon at the 2012 American Academy of Religion conference in Chicago. 

When did you go public the first time with something you held deeply?