Clip 1: Spiritual capital, virtue, and business (Templeton Foundation)

A conversation between Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, author of "Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business," and Matthew Bishop of the Economist. For more information about Templeton Book Forum events, please visit http://www.templeton.org/events/book_forums/

Critics of capitalism tend to see big businesses as greedy, malicious, and unscrupulous—above all, as unconcerned with the public good. In Spiritual Enterprise, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch answers these charges by suggesting that free-market economies thrive in part because of their "profound connection to a fundamentally religious frame of mind." Malloch develops the notion of "spiritual capital" to describe the distinctive virtues that sustain capitalist relationships. From Wal Mart to IBM and across a range of religious traditions, Malloch demonstrates how companies that operate according to a spiritually-based ethic have outperformed their competitors.

About the Speakers:

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch is chairman and CEO of the Roosevelt Group and the founder of the Spiritual Enterprise Institute. He headed consulting at Wharton-Chase Econometrics and has worked in capital markets at Salomon Brothers. He has held positions at the United Nations and has served in senior policy positions at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and in the U.S. Department of State.

Matthew Bishop is American business editor and New York bureau chief of the Economist. He is the co-author (with Michael Green) of Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, about the global boom now under way in philanthropy. He is also the author of Essential Economics, the official Economist layperson's guide to economics.

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Tags:

• templeton
• templeton foundation
• spiritual enterprise
• Theodore Malloch
• Matthew Bishop
• greed
• capitalism
• public good