The Business, Faith and Common Good Institute has been awarded a 1.2 Million dollar grant for the Economy of Communion Project– an effort housed in the Heider College of Business at Creighton University to promote the Economy of Communion Movement by creating content and materials for professors to use in the classroom, and for students and business people to use to learn more about an Economy of Communion approach to business practices.
Creighton will be providing infrastructure and support for the project. Staffing which is funded by the grant will include the director (Andy Gustafson), associate director, an assistant director, and at least 2 interns, employed by Creighton but funded through the grant. Aspects of the project include a symposium event the 2nd year which will bring noted scholars to Creighton to present papers which will be published in a book. The project involved also doing extensive interviews with at least 12 entrepreneurs. The footage from those interviews will serve both as a basis for an edited-down 1 hour video, as well as snippets which will be paired with case studies on various EoC examples of how to treat customers, employees, competitors, how to approach marketing, economics, entrepreneurship, leadership, etc with EoC values. Also short essays will be commissioned from various professors, teachers and experts to give brief overviews of focused topics such as “an EoC Approach to HR, with examples” and “How an EoC approach to Economics differs from traditional Economics” and other similar essays for classroom and lay use. Finally, we also will be putting together an EoC course which will be available for free to any university who may want to use it. So many classroom-friendly deliverables will result from the project. The materials are aimed at those who participate in business generally, not just those who own businesses of their own. More can be seen on our website at the EOC Project page.
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.
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.
Business, Faith, and the Common Good Institute 