Wasting Time Well: Leisure as the Point of Education | Dr. RJ Snell

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given at New York University on September 21, 2022. For more information on upcoming events, visit thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: R. J. Snell is Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. Prior to his appointment at the Witherspoon Institute, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He has been visiting instructor at Princeton University, where he is also executive director of the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Life. He's written books and articles on natural law, education, Bernard Lonergan, boredom, subjectivity, and sexual ethics for a variety of publications.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.5	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:08.0	So the topic for the evening is how to waste time well, which you're already doing just by being here, I guess.
0:17.0	So congratulations. The Thomists of the strict observance may think that it's not especially
0:24.0	to mystic, but I would suggest that it's themistic in its essence, even if it's not scholastic
0:28.9	in its form. I don't know whether that will satisfy you or not. Perhaps in my defense, I'll say
0:33.6	it's to mystic-ish at the end.
0:42.3	A few years ago in a widely noted essay, William Dorshowitz warned that the nation's top colleges were turning kids into zombies.
0:44.9	His words, not mine.
0:46.7	While Dorshowershowitz noted that many of his students at Yale were bright, thoughtful,
0:50.1	creative kids, most of them seemed to content the color within the lines.
0:54.1	This is all just him. I won't tell you what I'm
0:55.5	quoting. Very few were passionate about ideas, he said. Very few saw college as part of an intellectual
1:00.8	discovery. In fact, he said everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment's notice.
1:06.7	Now, I know students at Yale aren't NYU students, and that's probably why they feel so sad about themselves and their studies, and throwing shade at any Columbia students here for not having invited me to the Columbia chapter.
1:18.8	Obviously, anyone who's not in NYU would be upset about their college experience.
1:23.4	But I wonder if you might recognize something in Der Wersishowitz's description of students who are driven, accomplished,
1:30.8	accomplished, talented, successful, capable. And yet, as he goes on to describe, if you look beneath the facade of seamless well adjustment, what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, emptiness, aimlessness, and isolation.
1:47.0	The prospect of not being successful is their greatest terror, he says.
1:53.0	Or as Mark Schiffman, Chair of Humanities at Villanova once termed it,
1:57.0	contemporary students are not majoring in physics or in mathematics or classics.
2:01.5	They're majoring, he says, in fear.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.