You're listening to a special weekend edition of The World and Everything in it. I'm Nick Eicher.

Over the past several years, a phrase has settled into our public vocabulary, non-essential worker.

We heard it during the government shutdown this fall, and we may hear it again in a matter of weeks.

But non-essential worker is no government invention, much as it might sound like one.

It is a cultural judgment, and it carries a far deeper assumption, that some people and some forms of work are ultimately optional. At the same time, another

reality has been hiding in plain sight that millions of men in their prime working years, able-bodied

men, have withdrawn from work altogether. They are not counted among the unemployed. They are

inactive. They've come to treat their own

contribution as non-essential and have withdrawn from productive life. The government's headline

unemployment figure each month does not include them, and this is no temporary blip associated with

difficult economic conditions. It is a long, secular trend. On the Monday money

beat, on the world and everything in it, we have again and again reported that the problem

does not stem from a lack of jobs. It is a loss of purpose, a collapse of will. When work is

reduced merely to income, when vocation is stripped of dignity,

idleness stops being shocking and eventually becomes acceptable.

Recently, World hosted the first event in a new series we're calling The World Stage.

Our first guest speaker was David Bonson, wealth manager, long-time commentator on the world and everything in it, and author of a book titled Full Time, Work and the Meaning of Life. On that September evening in Houston, we met world listeners, answered questions, and listened to David describe this urgent problem the church must not continue to

ignore. How does a theology of work fit into that? We did have audience questions and David answered

those, but this one struck right at the heart of the crisis. It's a theological issue that I do feel

the church has largely, not entirely, but largely failed to be a prophetic voice on.

Now, look, it's connected to other elements that matter in human economy.

I think the fact that there are so many young men, by young men I'm going to use the terms of basically from, let's call it, 20 to 35 years old,

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