Joe Rockey brings a live, unresolved situation to Father Boniface Hicks — a rental property sale that was supposed to close today, a buyer who stopped answering the phone with no explanation, and three live options sitting on the table. Rather than wait to tell the story after it's resolved, Joe thinks it through out loud with Father Boniface in real time, and the two work through what the Church actually has to offer a business decision like this: not the "how" of the deal, but the ethical "why" underneath it. Key Ideas: - Business, science, AI, and governance all get boxed out of the Church's input under a misreading of "separation of church and state" — but the Church's real contribution isn't the business details, it's the realm of ethics those details have to operate inside. - Implicit agreements carry real relational weight even without a signed document — Joe had already lived past the original closing date once as a reasonable extension, which clarified what he actually owed the other side versus what he didn't. - Hard moral boundaries (don't lie, don't violate confidences, don't act unjustly) come first; everything past that is prudential judgment — the most reasonable path given practical reason, relational knowledge, and openness to the Holy Spirit's guidance. - Strong emotion — anger, anxiety, hurt — is exactly the state that clouds prudential judgment and triggers fight-or-flight defenses, which is why talking it through out loud, and praying it through, matters before acting. - Whatever choice gets made, you live with it afterward — so the goal isn't a perfect decision, it's a reasonable one made from a clear head instead of a wounded one. Links & References: None explicitly referenced with a clear official/source link in this episode. If this helped, please leave a review or share this episode with a friend. Questions or thoughts? Email FatherAndJoe@gmail.com. Transcription: Hello and welcome to another episode of Father and Joe. I am Joe Rockey here with Father Boniface Hicks. And Father, this is going to be one of those episodes where I bring something that's very real in my life, that's going on pretty much as we speak, to get guidance in the middle of — I think the first time we did this was the snowplow story that you actually referenced a couple weeks ago. So what is happening is I have a rental property, which in and of itself has a lot of moving parts. You've got a tenant who is your typical tenant — most of the time things are good, but when things are bad, they're the most annoying thing in the world, because you're a landlord, and that's the way landlords view all tenants: good or bad or ugly, that's reality. Because they don't want to deal with this — it only ends up being more expensive, and they only talk to the tenants for one of two reasons, and they're both bad: either something's broken with the house, or there's something broken with the tenant, meaning they're not paying. So in general, when a landlord has to re-engage with a tenant, not awesome. So when I have one that's very good, I don't want to mess with — I don't like rocking the boat. However, like many other landlords, I get things in the mail that say, "Hey, I'll buy your house for this price," and I finally got one where it's like, oh, that's a number I actually would consider selling it for. Let's go forward with this company and do that. And I do — I go through the whole nine yards, I vet them, I talk to them, blah blah blah, and the long story short, I wanted to make sure that the company that's buying it is actually going to do the closing, that they're not dependent upon finding another buyer on top of them to be able to make this happen. So that's what they claim — they claim they fit all the boxes. And here we are, literally today, as we're recording this, we were supposed to close this. Until this point, they were always immaculate at picking up the phone, responding, et cetera. And it wasn't even them — it was the closing agent they hired who told me yesterday, "Oh, by the way, we're not closing tomorrow" — no explanation why or anything like that. Now, me knowing things — and arguably the closing agent messing up — I now know who they are selling it to, the amount that they're selling it for, et cetera. So I'm sitting here with a couple of different options in my world. I could either: A, just eat the fact that I built this entire day and other businesses around clearing out today, that they did not close on because of some fault that was not mine, and I could just eat that and move on — they'll tell me a new closing day. I could be just give them a deadline — we're closing by X time, either you're doing this or not, I know you're going to make money, so do it. Or, see, now that I know who the buyer is and how much he's buying it for, I could cut them out altogether. I see these three options before me. My mind is weighing all three of them. I have a leaning towards one, but I don't think I'm going to share that, because I think it would make the episode more compelling if I don't share that. But that's where I am at sitting here, and it's where I'm at. Well, as you present that to me, obviously I'm a monk and a priest, I'm a spiritual director, I'm a theologian, I'm a whatever — I come from the faith perspective and the church side of things. In terms of good business deals, that's not something I'm qualified for. But I'm setting it up this way because in general, someone like yourself, a businessman — and we could move that into the realm of science, or governance, public works, a whole variety of things — what does the church have to say about these things? And sometimes the church is just categorically excluded: you don't know business, business people know business, why would we want to talk to the church? You don't know science, business people — scientists know science — this kind of claim. Now, there's problems with that in itself, because in fact there are principles of business, and the church has actually promoted science, and there are — but just to leave it at that: the experts in one realm don't talk to the church because they're supposed to be only the experts in theology and philosophy, which is somehow separate from everything else. And this kind of separation of church and state concept, which is itself a little bit of a distortion from what the founding fathers intended, has given permission for people to just relegate the church to the side until, you know, their baby needs to be baptized or something, and the church can do her own thing around that. But what does the church bring? The church always brings the realm of ethics — so not necessarily the what, but the why and the how. Not all of the business details of the how, but kind of the realm in which the how should take place. It's become really clear — the illustration becomes even clearer in the world of AI, because we have some ideas about how AI should do some things. AI should not sacrifice the heat and electricity to your house in order to better power its data centers. So what is that? Well, that's ethics — those are moral principles that are a realm in which we should operate, and if we operate within the moral realm, then we don't commit acts of injustice, and we do good and not evil, and that preserves a lot of things in terms of the just ordering of society, and the realm in which everybody can maximally thrive. I don't want my advantage to be to your unjust disadvantage — might does not make right. So applying those moral principles is really vital for things to function well on the large scale. They might work for a short time on the small scale — the bully on the playground gets away with it for a while — but it's not a long-term viable process. So anyway, my questions about your setup would be around the ethical realm. Have you promised something? Would this be breaking a promise, damaging integrity? Would it require lying, in the sense of breaking a contract? Does it damage a relationship to change directions at this point? Those kinds of agreements become a matter of justice, whether it's explicit or implicit — there's relational stock in play even though you didn't have a signed document. Was there a reasonable, implicit understanding that would be violated? Anyway, that's the sort of realm I'm thinking in — that ethical realm of what's right, and then you can sort of explore possibilities within that. Yeah, so let's go through all the implicit and explicit. So again, I wanted to do what we originally agreed upon, which was closing today. Actually, we originally agreed upon closing the last day of September — this is already the last day of September — this is already a pushing of it. So technically, the contract we did is already past, and we're just doing the reasonable extension of it, even though that was never put in writing. So, under all rights, I can do whatever I want now, including walk away or whatever — I am a free agent in that regard. So in terms of the implicit: well, you have all the tax bodies who thought they were going to get this transaction, because they get a transaction fee for the sale, and they thought they were getting that today. So that's not going to happen, at least today. In terms of the tenant, they're going to have a new person regardless — that's within my right as being the landlord to change that. To this moment, I haven't told them, because there's no reason to rock the apple cart until it is sold. So, quite frankly, their life will be unaffected one way or the other — the only difference will be the address they mail the check to, not really a big deal.
