The courage to rest, Thomas Aquinas on the soul of leisure.

Whenever the topic of leisure comes up in conversation, whether in the classroom or among friends,

inevitably someone will ask the question, have you read Peeper's essay?

The question is inevitable because in conversations about leisure, it is exactly the right question to ask. For 70 years now, Joseph Peeper's leisure, the basis of culture, has exemplified what discussion of leisure as a perfective human activity

should be.

In order to clarify their thinking on the subject, professors, students, and the general

reader still rely on Peeper's account, his succinct and compelling account of the nature of leisure, as well as his correction

of any number of erroneous notions of human rest that we might entertain.

With Thomas Aquinas as his guide, Peeper resists the modern tendency to regard leisure simply

as the cessation of work or worse to equate

leisure with sloth instead people emphasizes leisure's nature as an

activity not a lack of one and as a joyful celebration of reality, not a sorrowful retreat from it.

What I'd like to do this evening in celebration of the essay's 70th anniversary

is to review Peeper's description of leisure,

but with a view to expanding it.

With Thomas Aquinas as our guide, I want to build on Peeper's description of leisure by

exploring in greater detail than he does the soul of leisure, or better the soul capable

of leisure.

We will conclude that in addition to being a soul receptive of reality,

as Piper notes, the leisurely soul to be,

the soul of leisure courageously dreams and big dreams, and it does so humbly.

When he writes leisure, the basis of culture in 1947, Piper has a particular end in view.

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