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What is my purpose in life? Why am I in this job, this organization, this industry? How did I get here in the first place? Am I working to live or living to work? How do I measure my success? Does my work serve any greater purpose? Many individuals ask these kinds of questions at some point in their lives. When faced with life and death situations, as many were during and after the September 11th attack, these questions move out of the shadows. For some of us, questioning our purpose in life and career are frequently forced to the forefront by the pressures and challenges – and sometimes boredom and emptiness – of our workplace. Still, these questions are a powerful way in which our human spirit manifests itself. Therefore, finding meaningful answers to them is one of the essential tasks we face when we attempt to integrate spirituality more fully in our lives.

Religion and religious people have been viewed as detrimental to human and social progress. In a now classic case, Edward Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire held the blame for the decline of the Roman Empire squarely upon Christianity. But, among the great variety of denunciations of religion, perhaps the most acerbic criticism came from the pen of Karl Marx. He wrote:

WorldCom has been in the headlines since 2002 because of the $11 billion fraud that it acknowledged at that time. In order to please Wall Street and investors, WorldCom's top executives inflated the firm's profits by misallocating expenses and making many false accounting entries. The reactions of managers within WorldCom varied dramatically. Vice President of Internal Audit Cynthia Cooper and internal auditors Gene Morse and Glyn Smith became suspicious of accounting entries, which had no supporting documentation. They decided to pursue their suspicions. Working on their own time for several months and often late at night, the team ultimately uncovered $3.8 billion in false entries. During the course of their investigation, the internal auditors presented their suspicious information to both the chief financial officer Scott Sullivan and to WorldCom external auditors at Arthur Andersen.¹ Both Sullivan and the auditors at Arthur Andersen defended the entries and refused to provide additional information or to pursue the matter any further. The internal auditors at WorldCom found the fraudulent accounting entries four-quarters after they first began.

This chapter offers a speculative essay regarding how religion may foster intellectual humility in public life, drawing on case studies from faith-based community organizing in the United States. and liberation theology in Latin America. Despite a plethora of religious teaching about the virtue of humility across a variety of traditions, I do not think there is anything inherent in religious belief – in any tradition – that predisposes believers toward authentic humility in their personal or public lives. I argue instead that religious conviction – when embodied in particular kinds of religious practice – does help drive us toward the balance of confidence and intellectual humility required for vigorous engagement in democratic public life. My argument draws on the concept of focal practices and insights from philosophy, theology, and social theory as I consider religious practices, religious conversion, and the nature of human passions as they relate to democratic life.

When the Catholic bishops of the United States prepared the first draft of their pastoral letter on the US economy, they deliberately kept its contents confidential until after the presidential election of that year. They did not want it to intrude upon the campaign then under way. It was not made public until 11 November, 1984. The Lay Commission, chaired by William E. Simon, issued its document, Toward the Future: Catholic Social Thought and the US Economy, before the bishops' first draft but also after the presidential election. It was not a response to the bishops' then unseen document but an advisory counter‐proposal from a different perspective. The Lay Commission presumed that the two documents would be different certainly in the area of policy recommendations and in the evaluation of the performance of the American economy; they probably anticipated differences also in the understanding of Christian and Catholic tradition and principles. They were not wrong.