It is a platitude that most people, as they say, 'work to live' rather than 'live to work.' And in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, work weeks have expanded and the divide between work time and personal time has significantly blurred due to innovations in such things as electronic communications. Concerns over the value of work in our lives, as well as with the balance or use of time between work and leisure, confront most people in contemporary society. Discussions over the values of time, leisure, and work are directly related to the time-honored question of what makes a life good. And this question is of particular interest to philosophers, especially ethicists. In this volume, leading scholars address a range of value considerations related to peoples' thoughts and practices around time utilization, leisure, and work with masterful insight. In addressing various practical issues, these scholars demonstrate the timeless relevance and practical import of Philosophy to human lived experience.

This book brings together specially commissioned chapters from international experts in a wide range of disciplines concerned with work, leisure and well-being to discuss key, topical issues.

Focusing on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts the author takes the reader to the saloons, the amusement parks, and the movie houses where American industrial workers spent their leisure hours, to explore the nature of working-class culture and class relations during this era.

If we don’t get Sunday right, we won’t get Monday—or any day of the workweek—right. The divided life is a temptation so built into our society, we may not even recognize it. Yet most of us fall prey to it. We either undervalue work, resenting it as simply a job, or we overvalue it as an identity-defining career. Michael Naughton, drawing on his background in both business and theology, proposes that the key to finding balance is another important human activity: leisure. In light of leisure—not mere amusement, but time for family, silence, prayer, and above all, worship—work becomes a space where men and women can find deep fulfilment. Naughton provides real-world examples of how businesses can promote authentic human flourishment and innovation through practices and policies that support leisure. In Getting Work Right Michael Naughton will change how you work—and rest.

A fully developed biblical perspective of work and leisure finds the holistic balance missing from today in Puritan enjoyment of both as important to life.

One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Joseph Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial than it was when it first appeared fifty years ago. Pieper shows that Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure. Leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. He maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our cultureCand ourselves. These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Joseph Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of Awork as he predicts its destructive consequences.