Newman Exhibit Front Royal Statement
Newman Exhibit

Leisure — The Condition of Culture

A Five-Session Course

God rests in completion, not exhaustion — the seventh day as sacred time. Then Aristotle’s reversal of common sense: we work in order to have leisure, not the other way around.

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  • 3 units
  • 5 sessions
  • 10 essential readings
  • 9 works of art

Two essential readings per session, one supplemental — plus one work of art per session, to be looked at rather than read about.

The three units move from ontological foundations (what leisure is in the nature of things) through theological and spiritual development (how the Christian tradition received and deepened it) to cultural diagnosis (why modernity has lost it and what recovery might look like). Pieper’s own argument follows this arc, so assigning him in two stages — once in Unit 2 as a Thomist and again in Unit 3 as a cultural critic — lets students read him first as an heir to a tradition and then as a diagnostician.

What you will read

  1. Unit 1

    Biblical and Aristotelian Foundations

    What is rest for?

    • 1 What Is Rest For? 2 essential readings Sabbath and the classical discovery of leisure

  2. Unit 2

    Augustinian, Thomistic, and Monastic Developments

    Rest in God and the ordering of loves

    • 2 The Restless Heart 2 essential readings Augustine and the Christian transformation of rest
    • 3 Contemplation, Play, and the Vice That Opposes Them 2 essential readings Aquinas and the monastic inheritance

  3. Unit 3

    Modern Reflections: Diagnosis, Recovery & the Practice of Leisure

    Can we still be at leisure?

    • 4 Festival and Total Work 2 essential readings The feast, and the culture that cannot keep one
    • 5 Recovery 2 essential readings Skilled work, worship, and the practices that remain

Start the course

Free. Enter your email and we will send you a link that signs you in and keeps your place and your notes — no password to remember.