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As management literature goes, the work of Martin Buber is a long way from Reengineering the Corporation. Still, when Tom Chappell, CEO of the natural-toothpaste company Tom's of Maine, sought to rethink his business, he looked not to Michael Hammer, Peter Drucker, or Jim Collins for best practices, but to the Viennese philosopher more renowned for his treatise on religious ethics than any advice on strategic planning.

Buber, for those of you whose copy of I and Thou has fallen behind the bookcase, described two sorts of relationships people can have: an I-It relationship, in which we treat others as a means to an end (in business terms: "How can I get this salesguy to make the numbers I need?"), or an I-Thou relationship, in which we treat others with full respect and mutuality ("We are partners in this enterprise"). "Buber said the way to live is to combine these two into a way of being, to integrate goodness and performance," Chappell says. Why not apply this idea to a business context?

Chappell first began wrestling with Buberian thought at the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) while on sabbatical from running his company 18 years ago. The experience, he says, "gave me a worldview that I could use everywhere in life." More important, he says, he no longer felt he had to apologize for wanting to incorporate values more thoroughly into his business. After Harvard, he says, "I could argue quite confidently that a holistic view of what's good for society or nature was also good for consumers and shareholders."

While the business school on the other side of the river gets all the attention for turning out world-class leaders, HDS has quietly graduated a roster of exceptional businesspeople. Among those who can trace their pedigree through the gray stone and arched windows of Andover Hall are Chappell; Sanford Keziah, founder of the Boulder, Colorado, branding-strategy firm Kindred Keziah; J.B. Schramm, CEO of College Summit, an organization that helps low-income students prepare for college; Jerry Baker, partner of the executive-search firm Baker Parker and Associates; Martin H. Levin, an attorney at Levin, Papantonio, and designer of SmartJURY, the first commercially available jury-selection software; and Ronald Reagan's former budget director, David A. Stockman, who went on to found a worker-friendly private-equity firm, Heartland Industrial Partners.

While the HDS alumni office points with pride to these and other extraordinary business graduates, the divinity school's response to the growing national interest in faith in the workplace has been surprisingly conflicted. To scholars rooted in the flinty soil of New England, the vogue for spirituality in the corporation too often seems academically flabby, lowbrow, even vaguely unsavory. As a consequence, critics charge, the school has failed to create any lasting programs that address the nexus of religion in the workplace, and its professors have produced little in the way of substantive research on the topic.

The word that might characterize the Harvard faculty's feelings toward the melding of God and capitalism? "Abhorrent?" former dean Ronald F. Thiemann helpfully suggests. Indeed, so skeptical was the school's admissions office of Chappell's motives for applying, for example, that it admitted him only on a provisional basis. After he blew through his first semester with straight As, HDS finally agreed to make him an official student.