Bringing these seemingly disparate parts together has much to do with my spiritual formation, which has its roots in a Catholic lay movement called Focolare, founded by Chiara Lubich in northern Italy during World War II. The movement’s spirituality centers unity and provides a wide array of practical tools to help individuals and groups move toward a collective spirituality. This has given me a hunger to see the things that unite sectors, disciplines and people. I think throughout the fifteen years of my career I’ve been looking to bring my interests in finance, policy, personal and social transformation together — and to do so in partnership with those who are on a similar journey toward integration. I believe truth and wisdom are often found in the middle of tensions — so the synthesis of these different perspectives — public policy, impact investing, religion and spirituality — can hopefully contribute to greater human and planetary flourishing.

Let me go back to a visit to Berkeley, California a few years ago. I had joined a gathering at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology to reflect on the “role of the laity” in the American Catholic Church. The laity — quite simply — can be understood as people belonging to a faith tradition who are not part of the clergy.

I had been asked to share remarks at this gathering and my mind went first to the “frontier entrepreneurs” I had accompanied in Boston and Detroit on their journeys to seek partners and investment. I thought about Amy, who was building a jewelry company run by women who were transitioning out of homeless shelters to repurpose fallen graffiti in Detroit. I thought about the urban farmers, the makers, the cooperatively owned restaurant and community space on the still yet poorly trafficked main street.

As I sat with their stories I realized that in some way, they were co-creating with the Divine, finding value in spaces that are often overlooked, in an endlessly creative act of trying to make matters “on earth” more as they are “in heaven.”

I began to see more clearly the ways that we can harness the creative act of entrepreneurship as a space for personal and collective spiritual transformation, and as fertile ground for the integration of spiritual practice and daily life. I believe the Catholic Church (and any faith tradition for that matter), with its reservoir of philosophical and theological tradition and practice — often honed over centuries — can be a center for formation in principles that guide those who are building and investing in companies and organizations that steward the good of our communities and planetary home.

First, I think about how we can draw upon our faith traditions to “form principled entrepreneurs and innovators.” In the Catholic world, I’ve found Catholic Social Teaching to be a rich place to identify guiding principles.

Second, we can (and should) harness the institutional assets of the Church, and the resources of religions more broadly to invest in principled innovation and entrepreneurship.

And finally, we should self-organize in more creative ways to integrate faith, work and our daily lives.

Everywhere I look, I see signs of a growing openness to the idea that we need more entrepreneurs, and people in business broadly, who are well-formed in ethics. There is no such thing as a view from nowhere and, for those of us seeking to lead lives of meaning, we must discern our principles and remain grounded in them.

Yes, my own formation of conscience and encounters with social reality have shaped my view of entrepreneurship and investing as spaces that are ripe to apply the principles of my faith tradition. It has made me feel compelled to participate in some sort of evolution of the “homo economicus” to “homo cooperativus,” a shift from the self-interested pursuit of power and wealth to an economy marked be relationality, “communion,” the dignity of work and a preferential option for those on the margins of current power structures.

This formation is what led me to participate deeply in an economic experiment called the Economy of Communion — an initiative that began in the Focolare to start companies that embody the values of the Gospel in their everyday affairs, and place a portion of their profits in common. Today, some 1,000 Economy of Communion businesses around the world share profits to support those in need, as well as contribute to formation programs focused on building businesses according to the ethos of a “culture of giving,” which privileges a worldview of abundance over scarcity and focuses on serving a multitude of stakeholders, not just shareholders.

Today, I’m undoing much of my own learning as an impact investor who was trained with the tools and consciousness of neoliberal capitalism. I am in deep partnership with people who are asking what it means to tell a different story about who we are as human beings and our role as investors. Along with my co-founder Felipe Witchger, I am reflecting on what it means to move from capital supremacy to capital reciprocity — where capital is in service of our deepest aspirations and thriving, rather than dictating them. And I’m thinking about what true non-extractive finance looks like, where we give more than we take with folks like the entrepreneurs I mentioned earlier.

Exactly. Just as the Economy of Communion group has done with its roots in Catholic Social Teachings, we need to ask how we can form entrepreneurs and investors rooted in social principles inspired by our various faith traditions.

For me, Catholic Social Teaching has felt like fertile ground to start; it already demands that we replace idolatry of the market, efficiency, and profits for shareholders in favor of a preference for the vulnerable and the good of authentic, life-giving relationships.

Pope Francis has criticized economies in which the mere pursuit of money supplants a higher concern for the common good, warning that the love of money over people “ruins society,” “condemns and enslaves men and women,” and “destroys human fraternity.”

I definitely see opportunities to harness the assets of the Church to advance an alternative economy. According to one Georgetown study, religion broadly is a significant source of America’s economic and social strength, annually contributing about $1.2 trillion dollars of socio-economic value to the US economy. That is equivalent to being the world’s 15th-largest national economy and is more than the global annual revenues of the world’s top 10 tech companies. You could say that’s a lot of “spiritually inspired” dollars being pumped into the US economy.

There has been real progress made around strategies to “negatively screen” the assets held by religious institutions and households, ensuring for example that a religious order isn’t invested in tobacco or an industry that is significant furthering environmental degradation, as that allocation of assets might stand in direct contradiction to the values they seek to espouse.

Today, there appears to be a thirst to take a more proactive stance, and identify opportunities to pursue good, not just avoid negativities. Our focus at the Francesco Collaborative is to invite Catholic and other faith tradition-inspired investors to draw from the principles of Catholic Social Teaching to foster non-extractive financial principles.

A great example of the latter: the three principles developed by Transform Finance. First, meaningfully engage communities in the design, governance, and ownership of the investment process and enterprises. Second, ensure that those running institutions are structuring transactions to add more value than they extract. And third, balance risk and returns between investors, entrepreneurs, communities, and other stakeholders so that everyone benefits.

We are asking many questions in our Francesco Collaborative community — how does our cultivation of a moral center and the formation of our conscience invite us to think differently about risk, return, impact? How do our shared principles invite us into non-extractive practices with our investments? Increasingly, we see ways we can bring a full spectrum of assets — financial, relational, and other forms of capital — to bear on behalf of our investment philosophies.

I think we can form new kinds of communities and spaces that better support our efforts to integrate our spiritual and creative lives. Person by person, iteration by iteration, I have seen endeavors to do exactly this — whether it’s repurposing a church into co-working space for spiritually-rooted entrepreneurs, or the Investing in Livable Futures workshop launched by our Francesco Collaborative community. These are spaces where we can be vulnerable with one another in unlearning our conventional economic and investment paradigms while supporting one another in a new praxis.

Many faith traditions have been pioneering in these ways. Glean Network is an incubator, born out of Jewish tradition, that provides a 12-week intensive entrepreneurship education program, combined with a certification in spiritual entrepreneurship. In their words: “Our hope is that our own shared ‘gleanings’ will equip a generation of spiritual entrepreneurs to more wholeheartedly love the problems they’re trying to solve, the constituencies they aim to serve, and the world they dream of bettering.”

At the end of the day, I believe it does come down to believing in the forces greater than human that can place us in a reality of abundance. Pope Francis wrote in his papal exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, that businesses must “serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.”

This goes well beyond — even contradicts — our current economic thinking where we produce a finite set of goods that each individual maximizes for their own well-being, getting caught up in debates about redistribution.

Rather, when our formation leads us to see how our well-being is bound up in the well-being of all, we unleash a creative force that places us in the oikonomia — or God’s economy. And we can take up a noble calling to nourish the projects and practices we need in order to build this kind of economy where we all belong, and we all can flourish.