As we come up to Thanksgiving, we would like to draw your attention to the latest issue in our year on Work at Humanum. In “Good Work, Fruitful Rest,” we ask if questions about work and rest don’t stand and fall together. If rest were real rest, how would that affect the way we work? And how would good work open us up to more fruitful, less dissipated rest?
We look at the role of silence, as highlighted recently by Cardinal Sarah, and also the role of good, natural sleep in human replenishment, through Péguy’s classic meditation on the subject. What does the paradigm of play have to contribute to how creative we are as workers? How can we avoid falling into the trap of superficial tasks and seek out meaningful moments of “deep work”? And how does the way we structure our time, especially making Sunday a genuine day of rest, change the way we conceive of the work we do? What bearing does a genuinely liturgical or sacred sense of time have on all this?
Our reviewers, including David L. Schindler, examine the question of how we can re-enchant and re-animate our economic activity so that it does not oppress the very humanity which needs to work in order to live. And the question of the type of work we pursue is, of course, not a neutral one either. We crave jobs that allow us to see tangible results and be part of something greater—work that allows us to share in the creative work of God in our little corner of the world.
We are also pleased to offer you a personal reflection on monastic recreation written by Dom Philip Anderson, O.S.B., Abbot of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma. The Abbey was founded by students of John Senior—a great American Catholic thinker whose work deserves to be known better.
Read the full issue on the Humanum site.
Featured articles include
Dom Philip Anderson, O.S.B., “The Smiling Silence: A Monastic Way of Recreation“
Conor B. Dugan, “Liberating Silence in the Dictatorship of Noise“
Deborah Savage, “From Monday to Sunday: The Eucharist and the Work of Human Hands“