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We’re living in unprecedented times. Coronavirus continues to spread, and the fear and anxiety attached to it are moving even faster. It’s no secret the effects this pandemic is having on the economy and investing market. So, what do we do?

That’s the question we posed to James Cham, a venture capital investor with Bloomberg Beta. He provided a unique and positive spin on everything happening worldwide, and we’re excited to share his encouraging words amidst these challenging days.

If this episode encourages you, we hope you share it with others who may need an uplifting word. As always, thanks for listening!

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An Interview with James Cham

@jamescham

James Cham LinkedIn

This article was originally published here by The Gospel Coalition.

We’re huge fans of Finny, Robin, Jason and the team at Eventide, and love the way that they are taking a redemptive look at investing. We recently featured Finny on our podcast, and it was great hearing his perspective on the influence of capital to shape the world for good. Some of our friends at The Gospel Coalition recently did a story on Eventide’s work. We’re excited to share it with you:

by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra

While Christian ethics around trade (be fair) and services (don’t cheat) and payments (don’t withhold them) is as old as Proverbs, the modern market is a complicated place.

“Most Christians are so removed from their money they don’t even know where it is.”

“One of the great financial developments is the role of an intermediary, such as a bank,” said Greg Phelan, assistant professor of economics at Williams College. “You and I—and almost everybody—would rather just deposit at the bank and withdraw when we need than figure out what small businesses or mortgages to lend to. I don’t have that expertise. And I don’t want to make loans that come due in years.”

It’s a wonderful, common-grace development that aids human flourishing. But it does mean people don’t directly oversee how their money is invested.

The same principle holds for stock-market investments—it takes so much time and energy to figure out which companies are worth buying that most people pay someone else to do it.

Add to that mutual funds (which ease risk by holding a little bit of a lot of companies) and company-provided 401(k) retirement plans (where employees often have little to no control over the investments) and most Christians are so removed from their money they don’t even know where it is.

And that level of confusion isn’t even the biggest part of the problem.

Sunday-to-Monday Gap

Today’s faith-and-work experts call it the “Sunday-to-Monday gap”; older faith-and-work experts called it the “sacred/secular divide.”

They’re talking about the disconnect between worshiping in a church pew one day and making photocopies in the office the next. Over the past few decades, the faith-and-work movement has been working to reconcile the two through books, conferences, podcasts, and fellows programs.

But if it’s hard for a Christian to puzzle out how God is redeeming emails and sales calls, imagining his will for savings accounts or retirement plans is even harder.

Especially because, for a long time, the gold standard for investing was to “maximize shareholder value” at any cost. Good investors didn’t waste their clients’ money on companies that didn’t have high, quick returns. Christian businessmen, who sat in the same MBA classes as everyone else, maximized profits to serve their clients and to give to the church.

Before Eventide was founded, others felt the same angst that Kuruvilla had. In 1992, Arthur Ally launched a mutual fund that screened out companies making money off abortion, pornography, alcohol, tobacco, and casino gambling. (Today the Timothy Plan also screens for “anti-family entertainment and alternative lifestyles.”)

Ally started the National Association of Christian Financial Consultants (NACFC) in 1997, the same year Larry Burkett started pulling Christian advisers together in what would become Kingdom Advisors (then known as the Christian Financial Professionals Network).

But still, the idea behind biblically responsible investing was young. The faith-and-work movement was just starting to bubble. Most people yet hadn’t considered God’s intention for their workdays—much less for business or investing.

Starting Eventide

In 2008, Kuruvilla, John, and a few others started Eventide Asset Management. (The name is Old English for “evening” and was chosen because humanity is in the evening of this present age while also being in the dawn of the next age—already, but not yet, redeemed.)

They sought companies that created “compelling value for the global common good”—in other words, companies that prospered by providing quality goods and services, stewarding creation, and treating employees, customers, and stockholders with integrity. They invested in a pharmaceutical company working to cure intestinal diseases, a paper company with sustainable practices, and a company supporting open-source software.

“For the first year, we started by investing the money of our friends and family,” John said. “We got a little over a million under management.” (It sounds like a lot, but Eventide’s revenue from that year was only about $10,000.)

The second year, financial advisers from organizations like Kingdom Advisors and NACFC—places that “were already passionate about aligning their values and investing”—brought Eventide’s investment amount up to $7 million, John said.

The third year, faith-based investors pushed Eventide investments up to $21 million. The fourth, to $34 million, and the fifth to $86 million. And then came year six.

Check out the rest of this article here!

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On today’s episode, we’re talking to an expert on capital, influence, and how investments can serve the common good. Finny Kuruvilla is the Chief Investment Officer for Eventide Funds, and if you haven’t heard of them, you’re going to be glad you did. 

They’re on a mission to pursue investments that make the world rejoice—and today, Finny is going to tell us just how they do that. With a unique background in healthcare, statistics, and investing—not to mention two postgraduate degrees from Harvard and one from MIT—Finny is the type of guest you just can’t get enough of.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Eventide

Priorities and Investing

Do You Know What You Own?

To Change the World by James Davidson Hunter

This article and video were originally published here.

Check out Eventide Investments for other quality content!

by Jason Myhre

When it comes to investing, many people today believe you have to choose between financial performance and social impact. Many tend to see these two goals in a kind of a see-saw relationship, where if you want to ‘shoot the lights out’ on performance it will likely come with ethical compromise, and if you want to maximize social benefit it will likely mean accepting a lower rate of return.

Where does this mindset come from?

At least one significant source for the modern split in thinking between ethics and economics comes from Adam Smith, in what is called Das Adam Smith Problem (use your browser to translate the page) or the Adam Smith Problem. Adam Smith wrote two famous books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), about ethics, and Wealth of Nations (1776), about political economy, which would go on to found the discipline of modern economics. The problem is that, though written by the same person, the two books are very difficult to harmonize. The two books have different and contradictory presuppositions about human nature: whereas human sympathy is the basis for Smith’s book on ethics, self-interest is the basis for Smith’s book on economics. There is little intertextual evidence of the same author between the two, save a thin thread of the virtue of prudence that can be traced in both. Because of the different and contradictory starting understandings about the nature of human beings, if you didn’t know the same person wrote the two books, you might conclude they were written by different people. Importantly, it was the first time in history where ethics was broken out from economics. If you can believe it, prior to this point in history political economy was a branch of moral philosophy!

What was Smith thinking? Did he have a shift in thinking about philosophical anthropology between 1759 and 1776, where he came to believe that human beings are most basically self-interested creatures instead of sympathetic? Unlikely. Rather, it’s helpful to understand the historical context of his writings.

Smith was writing at a time when scientific thought was really getting off the ground. Many of our modern ‘disciplines’ – the things we study in college today as separate fields of study – were founded during the time of his writings. At that time, there was a big push to really talk about the science of things – how things really worked – and to isolate subjects for examination in order to hone in on their inner workings. To separate ethics and economics, it’s likely Smith availed upon a popular approach at the time of making what’s called a fact/value distinction, or a positive/normative distinction. It goes like this:

• Let’s talk about the ‘facts’ and not make ‘value’ (or ethical) judgments;

• Let’s talk about what’s ‘positive’ (or true) and not ‘normative’ (shoulds and oughts about human behavior).

It was believed that you could bracket ethical considerations and talk about the pure, supposedly value-neutral ‘science’ of things – in this case making money. Right or wrong aside, this is how you make money – it’s science. Ethics is a separate discussion.

Play this forward to today and you get the modern mindset. This works upon us in a very strange way. I’ll describe it using three different metaphors:

1. The easiest way to picture the effect is to think about a child who grows up in a home where two languages are spoken. The child will learn both languages fluently and often switch between those languages seamlessly, sometimes even in the same sentence. “Mama, can I have more juice? Por favor?” This is called ‘code switching’ – to switch between two different languages. Like this child, we today are able to easily switch between two different ‘languages’ we’ve learned to speak about ethics versus economics.

2. This effect can also be thought about as different ‘social characters.’ Have you ever found yourself being a very different person in two different groups of friends? We sometimes call this being a chameleon. You may be more of a thinker with one group, and more carefree and humorous in another group. Similarly, we can tend to be different people whether we’re with our ethics friends or our economics friends. If I ask you, how does one make money, you take on the social character of economics; if I ask you how you think about ethics, you change social characters and start telling me about love for others.

3. We suffer from a kind of epistemological schizophrenia. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. It’s our method of exploration in life. So, with epistemological schizophrenia, we suffer from a radical change in person in how we go about approaching life. One moment we’re the kind of person who cares deeply about others and we seek to do good to those we can, and then all of sudden we change into a totally different person caring only about looking out for ourselves.

In each of these three descriptions of the effect on us today, we’ve learned to deal with the discontinuities of our views on ethics and economics rather easily and invisibly.

Philosopher Charles Taylor, in the hugely influential book A Secular Age, says “as we function within various spheres of activity – economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational – the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, […] the considerations we act on are internal to the ‘rationality’ of each sphere – maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to the greatest number in the political area, and so on.”1 We have these different ‘spheres’ of life and we tend to execute the script we’ve learned for each when we enter these spheres. You’ve heard people talk about compartmentalizing our thinking – having these different, separate, and uncommunicating compartments to our lives.

Fortunately, where modernism broke us up, postmodernism (or late modernism) has started to call this into question. Postmodernism said, “You know what, this inherited understanding has problems. Let’s go back and look at the presuppositions or assumptions that underlie this thinking.” On a personal level, people have felt the discomfort of having life all broken up and want to put themselves back together. Many people today are dissatisfied with and exhausted in remaking themselves over and over many times throughout the day. They want to be people whose lives have a genuine integrity – a ‘wholeness’ – where they’re the same person in every area of life. They want one sphere of engagement, life.

At Eventide, we count ourselves in their number. We reject the idea that we need to think about ethics differently from how we think about economics, or as we started, investing. We see investing this way: you are investing your money with companies, the companies inside of mutual funds, for example. Companies are made up of people and human relationships, therefore investing in our view is always, already, ethical. We believe that caring about investment return requires first caring about the kinds of companies that benefit people – customers, employees, suppliers, communities, the environment, and society broadly. We’re of one mind about ethics and investing, and it feels great. Want to join us?

This blog expresses the views of Eventide Asset Management, LLC, and such views may not be accurate. There is no guarantee that any investment strategy will achieve its objectives, generate profits, or avoid losses. Readers should be aware that Eventide’s approach may not produce the desired results, and Eventide’s ethical values screening criteria could cause it to underperform other firms that do not have such screening criteria.

4691-NLD-6/15/2018

This article was originally published here by Financial Advisor.

by Amit Bouri

In 1758, at their yearly meeting in London, all Quakers were called to “to avoid being in any way concerned, in reaping the unrighteous Profits” from what they called the “iniquitous practice” of slavery. Members of the same faith would later be among the loudest to call for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the Rerum Novarum encyclical that called all members of society to contribute to its betterment and outlined the relationship between labor and capital in a Christian society. Today it lends its name to a fund supporting Catholic businesses and philanthropy.

And as of 2016, 126 faith-based organizations of “diverse religions and creeds,” such as Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, and with a collective $24 billion in assets, had committed to divesting from fossil fuels, with many feeling a moral imperative to provide clean energy to the world’s poor.

There are similar examples from all faiths—from Judaism to Sikhism to Buddhism—around the world. Faith-based investors have long recognized the importance of ensuring their money is not out of step with their convictions.

So, while the increased attention that values-based investing has received may be new, many faith-based investors have been doing this type of investing for generations.

Read the rest of this article here!

It’s estimated that Christians manage over 150 trillion dollars. That’s over half the world’s wealth. That’s 200-300x what is given (around the world) philanthropically each year. Capital has influence. Yet many of us are content to let others determine our investment strategy. Watch this 3-minute video below or on our homepage to see what’s being done to change the conversation!

Please feel free to share it with others!