What does it mean to do business on Monday the way you worship on Sunday?

In this episode of PeppTalk, Alexa sits down with Professor Jooho Lee — business professor at Seaver College and lead investigator of Pepperdine's Faith and Business Initiative — to explore one of the most overlooked tensions in modern professional life: the gap between faith and work. Professor Lee calls it the "Sunday-Monday gap" — the disconnect between the values people hold in their spiritual lives and the decisions they make in the marketplace. Funded by a $260,000 Templeton Foundation grant, his initiative is working to close that gap through research, a fellowship program, and a growing campus conversation about what a genuine theology of business might look like.

Jooho Lee is an Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Law at Pepperdine University's Seaver College. He received his PhD in business ethics and legal studies from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned his JD from Penn Law School. He additionally holds an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary. His research focuses on the ethical and legal issues associated with theories of markets and firms, and his work has been published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Berkeley Business Law Journal, Tulane Law Review, Christian Scholar's Review, Philosophy of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, and more. Professor Lee is the lead investigator of Pepperdine's Faith and Business Initiative, which brings together scholars, practitioners, and students to explore the theological dimensions of business and what it means to close the Sunday-Monday gap."