Human beings are not simply producers; they are also lovers of beauty and contemplators of truth. They are wasters of time. The liberally educated person has a rich inner life that allows him to waste time well. As an undergraduate, I went for walks in rural Michigan. Sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Romantic walks, friendly [...]
Eutrapelia—the habit of playing well, of having good leisure—is one way to practice rest by doing something that brings us delight. It prepares us for eternity. If we cannot learn to rest in something good here on earth, how will we be able to rest in heaven? What would alien invaders make of watching a [...]
Writing can simultaneously take a lot out of you—you feel pleasantly exhausted after firing off a big piece of work—and make you feel wondrously light and buoyant. How is this? I think it is because writing is simultaneously work and leisure, a mental strain and a contemplative joy. We are used to dividing our waking [...]
In a season of disharmony, discord, distrust, and disorder, it is often painful to stop, to pause, and to give oneself distance enough to consider what must be recognized as good, and true, and beautiful, even in what seems a cesspool of existence. To give thanks, though, is not only necessary, it is salubrious! In [...]
The boy I saw fishing was enjoying a moment of solitude—a state of being alone that seems a luxury in a churning world agitated with digital waves. It made me realize that in leisure, we open ourselves to receive God and take confidence in trusting the mysterious and fragmentary. Be at leisure – and know [...]
For those facing another virus lockdown, the book “Action versus Contemplation” helps reframe the mind by revisiting the classic and ongoing dialectic between the contemplative life and the active life. Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters, by Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule (256 pages, University of Chicago Press, 2018) “Action versus contemplation” [...]
The pervasive “world” is a man-made complex of ambitions and obligations, a dense social and cultural and financial web that captures us and estranges our experience from the primal realities of earth and sky. We need to remind ourselves of the blessedness that can come even in the midst of the busiest days, that subtle [...]
When God commanded us to keep the seventh day holy and free from work, He expressed His knowledge of our nature, which we in the modern world rarely recognize. We are meant to rest, and we’re meant to enjoy our rest. If our pursuit of work and intensity is compromised because of our failure to [...]
Baseball is a thinking man’s sport—it requires a ton of focus on stats in order to get the most fun out of it. Because of this, and so much history and tradition involved, conservatives are naturally drawn to the game. Sometimes you can be in the right place at the right time. For me, it [...]
Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages had been given the gift, not only to peer into the twenty-first century, but to correspond with us who live in that most confusing and rudderless of centuries. Had it been in their power [...]