Giving Meaning to Work: The Spiritual Challenge of Our Time

Abstract

We experience in our social as well as our working life increasingly a drying out of those sources which give meaning and sense. The paper argues that this is the final stage of the process of rationalization as described by Max Weber. The ends modern man as the agent of business life persues are narrowed down to efficiency values and success. Spiritual and social values, which ultimately give meaning to life, are relegated to the background. But can those remnant values survive if they are not embedded in a wider framework of sense and meaning? This was also the question of Weber's contemporary P. Teilhard de Chardin. He shows in his work that only if we are able to give a new and personalized meaning to progress and see our own lifes in a wide framework of sense, will we continue to work for the betterment and sanctification of the world. It is the role of religion to keep open the sources of life and give a framework of meaning to man. This should also be the intention of a modern spirituality of work.