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Dorothy Sayers: Why Work?

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I did not realize until the other day that Dorothy Sayers’s classic, foundational, and fantastic essay on work is online.

This is one of the most helpful articles on work that I’ve read. Keller and many others refer to it often as well.

And, we still need to fulfill the challenge she lays down in it. She says at one point “the Christian church desperately needs a theology of work.” We’ve been doing better in the last ten years (some fantastic efforts are listed below), but don’t let the existence of some great new books on this fool you. We still have a long way to go in actually working this these truths into our hearts and lives.

Here’s one of the best quotes from Sayers’ essay:

It is not right for the Church to acquiesce in the notion that a man’s life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation.”

Here are some of the best books that have begun to give us a much better, articulate, and biblically grounded doctrine of work in recent days:

And here are some websites that I highly recommend:

Question: What other books and websites would you suggest?

Entrepreneurs Must Save America

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That’s the title of an excellent interview at the Gallup Management Journal with Jim Clifton on his book The Coming Jobs War.

Here are a few excerpts that are especially worth noting:

The U.S. has no shortage of great ideas and innovations. What the country needs now are highly motivated entrepreneurs who can turn those ideas into great businesses, says Gallup’s chairman. [But]…by concentrating on innovators and neglecting entrepreneurs, we may be making it harder to create the jobs the world wants and needs.

…The country that invents the future wins the jobs war, and inventing the future is what great entrepreneurs do.

…Businesses like the one Steve Jobs created and businesses like Intel and Microsoft and Amazon and Groupon and Facebook and eBay — nobody else sees that stuff coming. Nobody else says, “Hey, we need a site where we can post pictures from the weekend. We need a site that’s basically a 24/7 garage sale.” That wouldn’t have market tested well. But look at Facebook and eBay — they’re multibillion-dollar companies that created jobs for thousands of people.

We’ve got to accelerate that. To imagine that we’ll compete with China and those manufacturing jobs will come back is hallucination — or at best, wishful thinking.

…Engagement is a precondition for the state of mind that creates entrepreneurs. Miserable workgroups chase customers away. Miserable workforces don’t create any economic energy, so those companies are always cutting jobs. America will not come back and win the world unless we have the most spirited workforce. Spirited workforces create new customers. New customers create new jobs.

How to Follow Your Passion — in the Right Way

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My other post for The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics this month. In it, I once again take issue with the increasingly common view that “follow your passion” is bad advice.

The most important point in the post is that we need to recognize that our passions are actually activities, not abstract generalizations. Recognizing that point alone will bring amazing clarity to all of your career decisions.

Here’s the start:

We often hear the advice “follow your passion” or “do what you love and the money will follow.” Is that good advice?

A few business thinkers have recently been saying that it is not. Even the author of the popular Dilbert comic, Scott Adams, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, where he argued that “follow your passion” is bad advice.

Adams gives an example from when he worked as a commercial lender. The person who came in and said, “I want to open a sporting goods store because I really like watching sports on television,” was not the kind of guy who tended to be a good investment. Hence, “following your passion,” he argues, is not usually good advice.

But what’s the real problem here? I would argue that following your passion is, in fact, good advice—as long as you understand what that actually means.

Read the whole thing.