These short documentaries are very well done and are quite inspirational! The Faith & Co. documentary film series and courses from Seattle Pacific University highlight the struggles and triumphs of people living out business as their calling. Filmed across three continents in a wide range of industries, these inspiring examples provoke questions and provide insights about how to act as a faithful follower of Christ in business. Check it out here: https://faithandco.spu.edu/
Please join us for a unique opportunity! Business, Faith and the Common Good and the Menard Family Center for Economic Inquiry are bringing Dr. Andreas Widmer, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the Art & Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America to Creighton, with generous help from the Heider College of Business and other sponsors.
We are very excited about this year’s Business, Faith and Common Good Speaker Series! We have a wide range of experts coming to help our students think about business and the common good, ranging from the role of AI in the fields of Law, Medicine, and business, as well as nationally known experts in the fields of economics, entrepreneurship and Catholic thought.
Many thanks to our sponsors for their support in helping the Creighton Community host these public discussions.
Joe Vukov (Loyola-Chicago)
Joe Vukov is associate professor of philosophy at Loyola Chicago, where he serves as Associate Director of The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. His research explores questions at the intersection of ethics and the cognitive sciences, and at the intersection of science and religion. He is author of 3 books, including Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence, in which he argues that AI lacks the embodiment which is such a crucial aspect of human life.
Joshua Fershée, JD, became the 11th dean of the Creighton University School of Law on July 1, 2019. Fershée previously served as associate dean for faculty research and development, professor of law, and director of LLM programs at West Virginia University College of Law.
Steven Fernandes (Computer Science, Creighton U.) Building Robust AI Models
Dr. Steven Fernandes specializes in artificial intelligence, with a focus on deep neural networks, computer vision, and medical image processing. His research primarily revolves around the development and application of novel AI methodologies to enhance the accuracy and robustness of outputs from deep neural networks. A key area of his work involves creating metrics, such as the attribution-based confidence metric, which assess the trustworthiness of outputs from deep neural networks. Some of his work has been used in the field of medicine, demonstrating the value and impact of AI for medicine.
Andreas Widmer (Catholic U. of America)
Andreas Widmer was a Swiss Guard at the Vatican for Pope John Paul II, and wrote a book about lessons he learned there entitled, The Pope and the Ceo . He is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and teaches at Catholic University of America. His most recent book is The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship: Creating Enduring Value
Elisabeth Kincaid (Baylor)
Elisabeth Kincaid is associate professor of ethics, faith and culture in Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, affiliate member in the Department of Management, and Director of Baylor’s Institute of Faith and Learning. She previously held the Legendre-Soule Chair in Ethics at the College of Business in Loyola University New Orleans where she was director of the Center for Ethics and Economic Justice.
Alex Salter (Texas Tech)
Alex Salter is Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and an associate editor of the Journal of Private Enterprise. Additionally, he is a Sound Money Project senior fellow and a Young Voices State Beat fellow.
His newest book, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty: Political Foundations of Liberalism in the West, was released on August 8, 2023.
His other books are Money and the Rule of Law: Generality and Predictability in Monetary Institutions, published by Cambridge University Press (May 2021), The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good, published by Catholic University of America Press (June 2023), and The Spirit of ’76: Libertarianism and American Renewal, published by the American Institute for Economic Research (July 2023).
Jordan Magnuson (Southhampton, UK)
Jordan Magnuson is currently Senior Lecturer in Games and Media Art at the University of Southampton, and 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Media at the University of Bergen. His recently published book, Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), is a deeply interdisciplinary look at the potential convergences between game making and lyric poetry, and has been praised by a wide-range of scholars, game designers, and poets. Jordan started his first indie games company in 1999, and in 2005 he founded The Independent Gaming Source (TIGSource.com), a community site for indie game developers which became the birthplace of a generation of innovative indie titles such as Fez, Spelunky, Papers Please, and Minecraft.
Zach McDonald (entrepreneur)
Zach McDonald is former President of Three Crowns, a marketing company in Omaha. He recently founded his own company, Clay Pigeon Communications, and he is quite interested in AI and other technologies and their effects on business and society.
THANKS TO OUR GENEROUS SPONSORS!!!
Santiago Meija, is a professor in the business school at Fordham University in the Ethics and Law department, and a well published business ethicist. He holds the William J. Loschert Endowed Chair of Social Entrepreneurship, and his research focuses on corporate governance, moral psychology, organizational behavior and virtue ethics. He made a presentation at the Heider College of Business at Creighton University on September 28, 2023 and then met with our Business, Faith and Common Good seminar class about corporate ownership and the common good.
Thursday 9/21 we students got to hear from James Stacey Taylor about how buying and selling things may or may not devalue their value or impact social behaviors. In this our first BFCGI speaker for the fall 2023 speaker series, Taylor used examples of sex, blood plasma, and honor societies, among other examples. In the case of paying for blood, Taylor is of the view that it is actually better than having people voluntarily give it. In partial support for that claim, he pointed out that the US provides 80% of the world’s blood plasma, and they are one of the very few countries who allow people to be paid to donate plasma. Paying helps bring more plasma to those who need it. In other cases, such as paying to get a Nobel prize or to get into an honor society, paying for such things seems to undermine their value altogether.
James Stacey Taylor is a Professor of Philosophy at The College of New Jersey. He holds an MA (Hons) and an MLitt from St Andrews University, and an MA and a PhD from Bowling Green State University.
He is the author of five books, Stakes and Kidneys: Why markets in human body parts are morally imperative (Ashgate Publishing, 2005/New York: Routledge, 2017), Practical Autonomy and Bioethics (New York: Routledge, 2009), Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics (New York: Routledge, 2012); Markets with Limits: How the commodification of academia derails debate (New York: Routledge 2022), and Bloody Bioethics: Why Prohibiting Plasma Compensation Harms Patients and Wrongs Donors (New York: Routledge, 2022).
He also is the editor of two major collections of original essays by prominent philosophers: Personal Autonomy: New essays (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Death: Metaphysics and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2013).
He is also the author of 100 journal articles and book chapters, in venues such as Social Philosophy & Policy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Public Affairs Quarterly.
He is currently working on a book exploring the ontological and moral limits of markets.
He has authored numerous Op-Eds for publications such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, USA Today. His award-winning Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times was credited with influencing the ruling of the 6th District Court circuit that led to the legalization of payment for bone marrow. He is an occasional contributor to The Times Higher Education.
He lives with his wife and daughter on a small working farm in rural New Jersey.
We are very excited about our BFCGI speakers for this fall. (both will be in Harper Union Pacific Room)
On Thursday 6pm September 21 James Stacey Taylor will be presenting a talk on markets and morality in the Harper Center Union Pacific Room. Taylor teaches at the College of New Jersey and is the author of 5 books: Markets with Limits: How the commodification of academia derails debate (New York: Routledge 2022), and Bloody Bioethics: Why Prohibiting Plasma Compensation Harms Patients and Wrongs Donors (New York: Routledge, 2022), Stakes and Kidneys: Why markets in human body parts are morally imperative (Ashgate Publishing, 2005/New York: Routledge, 2017); Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics (New York: Routledge, 2012), Practical Autonomy and Bioethics (New York: Routledge, 2009). The talk will be at 6pm in the Harper Center. He has authored numerous Op-Eds for publications such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, USA Today. His award-winning Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times was credited with influencing the ruling of the 6th District Court circuit that led to the legalization of payment for bone marrow. He is an occasional contributor to The Times Higher Education.
At 6pm September 28, Santiago Meija, Business Ethicist from Fordham University, will be making a presentation on “Corporate Ownership and the Common Good” in the Union Pacific Room at the Harper Center. Of the 3 most-downloaded articles from Business Ethics Quarterly in 2022, Meija wrote 2 of them. Some of his most recent articles include:
Two of our Institute colleagues have exciting new opportunities to pursue. While we will miss them and their impact at Creighton, we know they will have a powerful impact in their fields in their new positions. David McPherson is heading to the University of Florida (Gainesville) where he will be teaching in a new great books program and college within the University which he will help get started. Christina is leaving to go to Boston College, a fellow-Jesuit school, where she will be a member of the theology department. This will be a great loss to Creighton, but a wonderful support for the common good, because they will be able to advance thoughtful work from a higher profile in their new positions! We wish them all the best, and pray for good things for their futures!
Business, Faith, and the Common Good Institute 