Join the Institute for Human Ecology and the Busch School of Business for a fireside chat hosted by Father Bob Gahl with IHE Scholar and Busch School Professor Michael Pakaluk about his latest book, Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel. In his book, Dr. Pakaluk supposes that Saint Matthew was a mid-level ambitious tax collector familiar with best practices of Roman banking, accounting, and contract law.

What difference might this make for how he conceived of and represented the Gospel? Dr. Pakaluk finds in Matthew’s Gospel clues for interpreting a saying which various Fathers of the Church attributed to Jesus, “Be good bankers.” The result is a marriage, not a divorce, between economic rationality and Christian discipleship.

This event is free and open to the public.

The event will be livestreamed.

Praise for Be Good Bankers:

“Few things are more opposed in the popular mind than commerce and Christianity. Investment, gain, loss, debt, payment, receipts, ledgers — what have these to do with salvation? Quite a lot, it turns out. In Be Good Bankers, Michael Pakaluk shows how Matthew the tax collector reveals the economy of salvation by way of what is most immediately familiar to most of us — the material economy. Pakaluk thus deepens our understanding of and gratitude for redemption. And along the way, he brings a new appreciation for the goodness of the economy that points to it.”

— The Reverend Paul D. Scalia, Episcopal Vicar for Clergy at the Diocese of Arlington and Pastor at Saint James Catholic Church