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Informed by the work of Laughlin and Booth, this paper aims to analyze the role of accounting and accountability practices within the fifteenth century Roman Catholic Church, more specifically within the Diocese of Ferrara (northern Italy), in order to determine the presence of a sacred‐secular dichotomy. Pope Eugenius IV had embarked on a comprehensive reform of the Church to counter the spreading moral corruption within the clergy and the subsequent disaffection with the Church by many believers. The reforms were notable not only for the Pope's determination to restore the moral authority and power of the Church, but also for the essential contributions of “profane” financial and accounting practices to the success of the reforms.

Original fifteenth century Latin documents and account books of the Diocese of Ferrara are used to highlight the link between the new sacred values imposed by Pope Eugenius IV's reforms and accounting and accountability practices.

The documents reveal that secular accounting and accountability practices were not regarded as necessarily antithetical to religious values, as would be expected by Laughlin and Booth. Instead, they were seen to assume a role which was complementary to the Church's religious mission. Indeed, they were essential to its sacred mission during a period in which the Pope sought to arrest the moral decay of the clergy and reinstate the Church's authority.

The paper shows that the sacred‐secular dichotomy cannot be considered as a priori valid in space and time. There is also scope for examining other Italian dioceses where there was little evidence of Pope Eugenius' reforms.

The paper presents a critique of the sacred‐secular divide paradigm by considering an under‐researched period and a non‐Anglo Saxon context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine financial management in the Pre‐Reformation church in Aberdeen, Scotland during the bishopric of Bishop William Elphinstone (1488‐1514).

The paper employs a combination of literature‐based analysis, archival research and the use of biographies in order to examine aspects of financial management within the Pre‐Reformation church in Aberdeen, Scotland.

There is evidence that accounting for assets and income was mobilised in order to achieve social aims. Recording mechanisms give visibility to the church's remuneration and governance strategy. Together, these examples show that there was no evidence of a sacred/secular divide in this context.

Archives may be incomplete but can give insight into financial management in historical context and aspects of the sacred/secular divide.

This paper aids understanding of visibility and governance possibilities afforded by accounting that has been mobilised in an historic setting in order to achieve social aims.

To introduce the three papers in the special section, an overflow from a recent special issue of the journal.

Provides a brief review of the papers.

The three papers focus on a common concern: the sacred secular dichotomy that has been employed in studies of accounting in religious organisations.

This introduction focuses on papers that encourage interdisciplinary research in accounting that draws specifically on theological insights.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the sociology‐of‐science type of accounting literature, addressing how accounting knowledge is established, advanced and extended.

The research question is answered through the example of research into linkages between accounting and religion. Adopting an actor‐network theory (ANT) approach, the paper follows the actors involved in the construction of accounting as an academic discipline through the controversies in which they engage to develop knowledge.

The paper reveals that accounting knowledge is established, advanced and developed through the ongoing mobilisation of nonhumans (journals) who can enrol other humans and nonhumans. It shows that knowledge advancement, establishment and development is more contingent on network breadth than on research paradigms, which appear as side‐effects of positioning vis‐à‐vis a community.

The originality of this paper is twofold. First, ANT is applied to accounting knowledge, whereas the accounting literature applies it to the spread of management accounting ideas, methods and practices. Second, an original methodology for data collection is developed by inviting authors from the network to give a reflexive account of their writings at the time they joined the network. Well diffused in sociology and philosophy, such an approach is, albeit, original in accounting research.

This study attempts to explore the meaning and implication of spirituality in an accounting firm by using a Buddhist perspective of interbeing. It explains how the happiness of individuals (auditors, partners, clients and auditor family members); organisational performance and growth and auditors' commitment are interconnected and impermanent.

This study employed an interpretive case study in an Indonesian accounting firm. The researchers explored the collective and individual feelings, thoughts, actions and experiences of the firm's actors. The data collection methods were interviews, participant observations and documentary analysis.

Leadership plays a major role in cultivating spirituality in an accounting firm. The spirituality increases auditors' commitment, (conditional) happiness and performance resulting in client satisfaction and the firm's growth. From an interbeing perspective, partners, auditors and clients are interconnected and impermanent. A firm's growth creates a growing sense of unhappiness due to the diminishing of auditors' comfort zone. Spirituality in the workplace can only engender conditional happiness and organisational commitment that offset the importance of material rewards and career prospects. To reach ultimate (unconditional) happiness, one requires a continuous spiritual development.

The insights gained from this study need enrichment from cases in different contexts, e.g. multinational firms with members from different countries and cultures.

This study develops the discourse of emancipation in the accounting literature by taking into account spirituality and happiness.

The paper's purpose is to use religious thought to inform accounting, and in particular to make a contribution to the ongoing debates concerning the merits of rules‐ and principles‐based accounting systems and the value of a rule‐overriding requirement of fair presentation in financial reporting.

The paper applies to accounting a conception of religion that is heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida's writings on religion and deconstruction. In order to clarify the nature of this religion and to facilitate appreciation of its significance for accounting it is progressively recast, in the paper, first in terms of deconstruction and then in terms of a demand for an infinite justice.

At the core of the paper, religious responsibility, as a demand for justice, in accounting is explored through Derrida's analysis of the relation between justice and law, which is found to have clear application to accounting in terms of an aporetic tension between an infinite demand for fairness in accounting and accounting regulation.

The analysis implies that the pursuit of justice as fairness in accounting, “doing the truth” in accounting, will always demand the negotiation of an unstable and difficult mediation between the poles of regulation and fairness, the calculable and the incalculable, the possible and the impossible.

The paper draws on the postsecular current in religion to make a novel contribution to the critical and interdisciplinary awareness in accounting that has begun to unsettle the hold that certain modernist dichotomies, such as that of myth and reason, have had on accounting thought.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of accounting in the management of Spanish military hospitals by the St John’s Order (SJO) of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century, a time of crisis between the Church and the State. The sacred mission of the Order required that they had a significant role outside the Roman Catholic Church in the care and treatment of the sick and infirm which required them to establish hospitals throughout Spain and across the lands that it had conquered. The study establishes that accounting played a key role in ensuring the success of the unconventional commercial relationship between the SJO and the government and the military.

Niebuhr’s typology is used to help understand how accounting practices were consistent, indeed essential, expectations of the sacred mission of the SJO and not something which represented a denial of the Order’s religious beliefs. The paper relies primarily on documents and other material located in Spanish archives.

The SJO accepted that secular accounting and accountability processes were relevant to their search for God’s love and to showing this love to others. The need for the Order to be accountable to the State was not regarded as profane and antithetical to their religious beliefs. Adopting Niebuhr’s typology of religion and society, this study concludes that the Order was an extraordinary example of Christ the transformer of the culture.

This study recognises the need to deepen the understanding of the way in which accounting practices have often played a critical role in the activities of religious organisations by examining an extraordinary example of one organisation which was engaged in an unusual, ongoing, highly complex commercial relationship with the Spanish State.

The paper aims to extend research which has sought to explain Britain's early success as an industrial power by identifying the influence of religious doctrine of the Dissenting Protestant churches on the development of accounting practices in the factory. The concern is not with specific accounting practices but with the social and moral environment which provided the incentives and permissions that encouraged late eighteenth century English industrialists to develop the practices that they used.

The paper draws on the highly influential writings of social theorists such Weber, Sombart and Tawney to identify the religious doctrines that both motivated and justified the rational, ideological business practices of prominent businessmen.

The rise of accounting as a powerful tool of control and discipline was significantly assisted by the teaching of the Dissenting Protestant churches on “calling”. Religious beliefs provided permissions, justifications and incentives which underpinned the entrepreneurial energies, opportunities and successes of the early industrialists. Accounting could be seen to assume almost the aura and nascent legitimacy of a religious practice, a means of sanctifying practices which were otherwise reviled by social elites.

Despite encouragement from accounting researchers for histories of accounting which give greater credence to the reflexivity between accounting and society, this has yet to find a significant presence amongst the searches for beginnings in cost accounting where economic and management factors remain the overwhelming focus. Religious beliefs are shown to have been especially influential in the adoption of accounting practices by early industrialists who were frequently members of the Dissenting Protestant churches.

This paper explores the role of accounting in a religious setting and evaluates the sacred‐secular divide developed by Laughlin and Booth who suggested that accounting is antithetical to religious values, embodying the secular as opposed to the sacred. Yet Christian thinkers such as Wesley and Neibuhr reject this position and indicate the accounting and financial issues do not necessarily conflict with religious values.

This paper explores narratives drawn from the Church of Scotland, the life and practices of Charles Wesley and the Christian doctrine of stewardship as a way of determining the verisimilitude of the “accounting as secular” claim.

These accounts and individual perceptions drawn from the Church of Scotland were more consistent with the concept of a jurisdictional conflict between accountants and clergy than a sacred‐secular divide. The life of John Wesley and the doctrine of stewardship show that accounting can be part of practices of spirituality. Sacred or secular accounting was found to be an issue of perception.

There is scope for future research into perceptions of accounting and the role(s) of accounting in sacred spaces.

This paper highlights the sacred role and aspects to accounting.

While the literature contains a number of studies of ethical investment funds, relatively little is known about church investment processes and practices despite the significant role they have played in the development of the sector. This paper attempts to address this lacuna by studying the ethical investment programmes of two UK churches: the Methodist Church and the Church of England. The paper initially explores the relationship between the Judaeo‐Christian church and the development of the ethical investment movement. This history reveals an engagement both at the institutional and individual level that challenges the assumed sacred secular divide now commonplace within the literature and the more recent guardian‐advocate dichotomy. Second, the paper delineates the way in which the churches theologically conceptualise this engagement and describes how these values are proceduralised through the operation of the funds. The final section provides an immanent critique of church investments both at a performative and theological level. The aim of this concluding section is to engage with the churches in exploring the broader potential for the church in effecting social change.