Busyness in our culture is often a point of pride, a marker of success and seriousness. But the philosopher Josef Pieper would have us consider whether, in filling every moment with useful activity, we have lost the capacity for the kind of activities that make human life worth living at all. Pieper argues that leisure is not idleness, but a contemplative openness that stands at the heart of genuine culture. He suggests that modernity has inverted the proper order of things. What then is the proper relationship between festivity and worship? Between the philosophical act and the merely practical one? Between tradition and freedom? And, in the end, what does it mean to live a life well-ordered?

Over four Fridays, please join Ahmed Almadlouh, Joseph Marshall, and Jensen Okimoto for a reading group on Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture, In Tune with the World, The Philosophical Act, and the opening chapters of Tradition: Concept and Claim, concluding with a summative conversation on Pieper's vision. In this session, we read Josef Pieper’s The Philosophical Act (pp. 63–116).