Seaver College Professors Jooho Lee, Chris Collins, and Reagan Schaffer Launch Campus-Wide Effort to Investigate Faith and Business with $260,000 Templeton Foundation Grant

Jooho Lee, Chris Collins, and Reagan Schaffer, three business professors at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College, were recently awarded a $260,000 grant from the Templeton Foundation that will fund a dynamic, three-part project to foster a deeper theological understanding of business.

“There is this long-running problem called the Sunday-Monday gap—where people go to church on Sunday yet struggle to connect with and live out their faith in the workplace throughout the rest of the week,” explains Lee, the project’s lead investigator. “God cares about what we do from Monday to Friday. And, more importantly, God cares about how we go about doing it. Plenty has already been published when it comes to faith and work, but I believe that we need more resources to address business—particularly the place of profit seeking in business—directly.”

To analyze and explore this issue, the three professors will use the grant to fund a scholarly book, launch a faith and business initiative at Pepperdine, and start a fellowship program in which business scholars and practitioners can begin bridging the gap between theory and practice.

As the project leader, Lee plans to research and write the book himself. With the text, he will “pave the way toward a theology of business that can be compatible with the traditional Christian antagonism to profit seeking.”

While Lee is developing this independent project, the trio of Seaver College professors will begin creating new faith and business opportunities on Pepperdine’s campus. Specifically, they will introduce a faculty seminar, whereby 10 professors from an array of scholarly disciplines analyze the pertinent topics of the field alongside an expert. For students, the grant will build upon the already- initiated faith and business Connection Chapel, which allows undergraduates to study the two topics side by side. And finally, for the Pepperdine community as a whole, Lee, Collins, and Schaffer will use the funding to start a speaker series, providing a forum for faith and business experts to share their findings with University students and other community members.

The final component of the grant will initiate a faith and business fellowship program. Lee, Collins, and Schaffer will work with an advisory board to admit 10 participants, who are either scholars of the field or active practitioners. The fellowship program will then pair scholars and practitioners together to pursue a research project of their choosing. Ultimately, this component of the grant will conclude with a faith and business conference where students, business leaders, and academic researchers can come together and further the dialogue of the burgeoning field.

This three-component endeavor is designed to engage a triad of participants. “I think of this project as a three-legged stool,” says Lee. “The first leg is students and the second leg is the faculty—the scholars. And the third and final leg is the business practitioners. We all have something to offer to the effort, and it's important that all three facets are involved.”

By including all three of these groups in the project, the three Seaver College professors broaden the scope of research and viewpoints contributing to this evolving scholarly conversation. The programming they hope to implement and the academic goals they expect to achieve represent an uncommon campus-wide effort to investigate faith and business together.

“Pepperdine has something distinct to bring to this important conversation,” says Lee. “Southern California is an important region in the global economy, and because Pepperdine is located just outside the city of Los Angeles, we are in a unique position to study and learn from the fourth-largest economy in the world. More than that, as a premier, Christian college, we can approach the topic from the perspective of Christ-centered faith.”