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Reference

Smith, B. R., McMullen, J. S., & Cardon, M. S. (2021). Toward a theological turn in entrepreneurship: How religion could enable transformative research in our field. Journal of Business Venturing, 36(5), 106139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2021.106139

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🎙️✨ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and to this episode of Weekend Classics.

I am always drawn to papers that do more than make an argument. I love the ones that quietly open a door, then ask us whether we have been standing in the wrong room all along. 📚💭

Today’s paper does exactly that.

We are looking at Toward a theological turn in entrepreneurship: How religion could enable transformative research in our field by Smith, B. R., McMullen, J. S., and Cardon, M. S., published in the Journal of Business Venturing on 8 July 2021, and brought to us by Elsevier. 🌍🕊️

At first glance, entrepreneurship is often told as a story of markets, incentives, risk, innovation, and profit. And yes, those things matter. But this paper gently, and then forcefully, reminds us that millions of people across the world do not live by economic logic alone. They live by belief, by calling, by faith, by sacred obligation, by a sense that work is not merely transactional but meaningful. 🔍🙏

What happens, then, when entrepreneurship research begins to take religion seriously, not as a side note, not as an inconvenient variable, but as a living force in how people imagine opportunity, endure failure, make decisions, and define success? That is the bold invitation at the heart of this editorial.

The authors argue that religion has been strangely neglected in entrepreneurship scholarship, despite being so central to human life across history and across cultures. They show us why that neglect happened, from assumptions of secularization to the practical difficulties of measurement, but they also show us why those barriers should not stop us. 🚪⚡

In fact, they suggest that a theological turn could make the field richer, more honest, and far more transformative. It could help us understand why some entrepreneurs are driven not only by profit, but by service. Not only by opportunity, but by purpose. Not only by recovery after failure, but by redemption after loss. 🌱🔥

And what I find especially moving here is that this is not just a methodological suggestion. It is a reminder that people are whole beings. They do not leave their deepest convictions at the door when they start a venture. They carry them into uncertainty, into ambition, into struggle, and into hope.

So in this episode, I want us to sit with that possibility together. What if entrepreneurship research has been listening carefully, but not completely? What if some of the most powerful explanations have been hiding in plain sight, in prayer, in doctrine, in ritual, in belief, in the moral imagination of the entrepreneur? 🤔✨

Thank you for joining me on Revise and Resubmit. If you enjoy these episodes, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, and also follow the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher 🎧📺. You can also find the show on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts 🍎🎙️

My thanks to the authors, Smith, B. R., McMullen, J. S., and Cardon, M. S., and to Elsevier for the original publication. 🙏📘

And now, here is the question I cannot stop thinking about: if faith shapes how so many people understand risk, purpose, suffering, and possibility, then how much of entrepreneurship have we misunderstood by pretending the sacred was never in the room?