This edition was a complete joy to pull together for our community. Starting with the concept of key culture-drivers, we found our way to the feature story on the Columbus School of Law and its unique focus on the human person — how that drives Dean Payne’s vision for the School and leverages the centers and institutes that are its life-blood.
They must be doing something right because our law school jumped 25 spots in rankings this past year and continues to have record enrollment and levels of engagement with the legal and judicial community. This is just one of the many ways our faculty, students, bodies of work, and schools and colleges are engaging key facets of modern life, thriving communities, and centers of culture.
Any discussion about building culture echoes Josef Pieper’s pivotal work, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), a phenomenal book that has important reflections still relevant for our world today. He dives deep into the first condition for culture to thrive, that of having space and time to think, to be, to engage with the Created world.
“Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and medieval Europeans understood the great value and importance of leisure. … religion can be born only in leisure, a 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. Pieper 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 non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture and ourselves.” (Angelus Press description)
In this sense, our University’s primary aim is to set aside generous amounts of space and time to the pursuit of what the ancient Greeks called scholē (the root of our "school"). This is a place dedicated to continually building up and reinforcing the most important elements of a life well-lived, and thus of life lived together. The Catholic University of America is dedicated solely to this pursuit and therefore enters the important work of continually building and regrounding the most important cultural elements of our time.
— Editors (Kathryn Mullan and David Hazen)
