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How To Get Fat In 90 Days! By Fran McGowen and Mark Futato
How to get fat and 90 days! I doubt that you have watched any infomercials with that lead-in lately!
Neither fat in general nor getting fat in particular is in vogue these days in our culture. There are scads of commercials and infomercials on how to lose those extra pounds one might be carrying. Reducing fat from our diets is hailed as a step in the right direction toward optimum health. So why a paper at a conference on ethics in business with a title “How to Get Fat in 90 Days!”?
This was taken from a chapter, entitled “How To Get Fat In 90 Days!” from the book Business Ethics Today: Adding a Christian Worldview as Found in the Westminster Confession of Faith.
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Some Biblical Contributions to Business Ethics by: Galen Radebaugh, PhD and Vern S. Poythress, PhD, Th.D.
Let us begin with Case Study 1, which involved Eisai. The FDA accused Eisai of misleading advertising for a drug product, Aricept, which is used in treating Alzheimer’s disease.
The Eisai case at first glance may appear to be one-dimensional. The advertising by overreaching violated specific federal statutes, namely the FD&C Act and 21 CFR 202. The most obvious ethical issue, then, is the principle of obedience to the authority of civil government, which is expounded most fully in the Bible in Romans 13:1–10, but also comes up for discussion elsewhere (1 Peter 2:13–17) and is one aspect of a larger issue of submission to authorities of various kinds (Eph. 5:21–6:9; 1 Peter 2:18–3:6; Ex. 20:12; Deut. 17:8–20).
This case contains greater complexity than what appears on the surface. A closer inspection reveals several dimensions. To begin with, we must deal with the issue of truth. The Bible stresses the importance of telling the truth (Ex. 20:16; Ps. 101:7; Prov. 6:19; 8:7; 12:17, 19; 14:5, 25; 19:5, 9; Eph.4:25). Did the advertising do that? Moreover, TV advertising includes a visual element, and the visual accompaniment of words can suggest much more than the words convey in themselves. What did the visual accompaniment suggest? Did it suggest more than the product could deliver?
This was taken from a chapter, entitled “Some Biblical Contributions to Business Ethics” from the book Business Ethics Today: Adding a Christian Worldview as Found in the Westminster Confession of Faith.
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Authored by Wayne Grudem & Barry Asmus
Excerpt from “What is at Risk for Business if we Lose a Christian Worldview” a chapter from the Conference Book, Business Ethics Today: Adding a Christian Worldview Using the Westminster Confession of Faith
The Christian worldview teaches that God is watching human activity and will hold everyone accountable, whether in this life or in the life to come. Paul tells servants (employees), “Work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward” (Col. 3:23–24 esv). Then he adds that there are certain consequences to good and evil deeds: “The wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality” (v. 25 esv). In the next sentence, he warns masters with a similar hint of judgment: “Treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven” (Col. 4:1 esv).
Without this sense of accountability to God, life loses meaning and business loses any ultimate sense of fulfillment. This is because God is supreme, and we are not. We worship and serve because we were created to worship and serve. Without a sense of something bigger than ourselves, the pursuit of possessions becomes a tedious and empty struggle. In the end, it becomes a “joyless quest for joy.”
This was taken from a chapter, entitled “What is at Risk if we Lost our Christian Worldview” from the book Business Ethics Today: Adding a Christian Worldview as Found in the Westminster Confession of Faith.
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Authored by Philip Ryken and Ron Ferner
Excerpt from “Church Support for Doing Business in God’s World” a chapter from the Conference Book, Business Ethics Today: Adding a Christian Worldview Using the Westminster Confession of Faith
In the July-August 2001 issue of the Conference Board Review, Laura Nash wrote an article entitled “How the Church Has Failed Business.” Among Nash’s conclusions:
• Businesspeople who claim to love their churches have difficulty identifying any ways in which their religion is a positive resource for them in their working lives.
• Pastors who profess admiration of their leading business congregants simultaneously describe Corporate America as a hotbed of greed and exploitation, a spiritual wasteland, a godless place.
• At best, the two professions have reached detente: they agree to disagree and keep off each other’s territory.
• Faithful businesspeople assume one worldview and identity on Sunday, another on Monday morning. They cannot see how a single, church-based faith can be an ethical resource for leadership in a postmodern world.1
The present paper aims to address Nash’s concerns about the way the church has failed business. It was coauthored by two friends from the same congregation who come from opposite sides of the business/church divide: a pastor and a businessman. Ronald Ferner’s business experience includes thirty-five years with Campbell Soup Company in eight locations across the United States. During this time, Ferner and his wife have been part of ten churches, including Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, where he presently serves on the Session with his senior minister, Philip Ryken.
The perceived tension between Christian faith and earthly business is nearly as old as the church itself. Even if so-called secular work has not been viewed as intrinsically evil, often it has been regarded as a second-rate way to serve the Lord, not to mention an arena for temptation and ethical compromise.
Going all the way back to the days of the early church, Christendom drew a sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular. There were two kinds of work in the world: one devoted entirely to God’s kingdom and the other engaged in earthly business. Yet only people who served in some religious profession truly were called by God. To cite one notable example, the fourth-century theologian Eusebius of Caesarea stated:
Two ways of life were given by the law of Christ to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living. . . . Wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone. . . . Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life. And the other, more humble, more human, permits men to . . . have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more secular interests as well as for religion. . . . And a kind of secondary grade of piety is attributed to them.2
In other words, some people are specially called to serve the Lord, but most people do ordinary work. This bifurcation between the sacred and the secular had the inevitable and unfortunate result up through the Middle Ages of denigrating the daily, worldly work of laypeople.
Happily, the Protestant Reformation wrought a radical transformation, as Martin Luther and the other Reformers rejected absolutely the notion that nuns, monks, and other clerics performed work that was intrinsically holier or more valuable than housewives and shopkeepers. According to the English Reformer William Tyndale, from an external perspective “there is difference betwixt washing of dishes and preaching of the word of God; but as touching to please God, none at all.”3
Rather than dichotomizing the sacred from the secular, the Reformers and later the Westminster Divines drew these two realms together by showing that every Christian has a dual calling (or vocation, from the Latin vocatio) to faith and work. As a result, Luther preached, “the entire world” should be “full of service to God, not only the churches but also the home, the kitchen, the cellar, the workshop, and the field.”
This was taken from a chapter, entitled “Church Support for Doing Business in God’s World” from the book Business Ethics Today: Adding a Christian Worldview as Found in the Westminster Confession of Faith.
To hear more, attend the conference by registering HERE