On Leisure

Alan Jacobs: “I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them.”

AKMA: “I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. ... Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. ... [O]ne way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). ... Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. ...”

Arthur C. Brooks in the Atlantic: “Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such ‘acediac’ activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships. ... Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus—in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony. We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways.”

Great minds think alike.

Early Judaism Video Lectures

Five years ago, the college where I teach responded to the Covid pandemic by radically altering our regular semester schedule. To ensure flexibility in case an outbreak meant we had to switch everything online, our fourteen-week semester was divided into two more intensive seven-week terms, with daily classes but shorter class times to satisfy our Province’s restrictions on in-person meetings. (Chairs also had to be six feet apart, which meant that those of us with larger classes had to teach multiple sections.) Thankfully, we were still able to meet in person, students were obviously glad to be there, and the smaller class sizes and more intensive format helped contribute to the learning experience.

The big challenge for those of us who teach content-heavy courses was making up for lost lecture time. To solve this problem we were encouraged to “flip” our class format by pre-recording lectures and saving face-to-face class time for discussion. I have to say I hated this. The videos took an enormous amount of work, and the quality of what I produced was, I thought, very poor. 

In subsequent years, however, I have found myself returning to the videos I produced for my 300-level introduction to early Judaism course (“Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity”), sometimes to remind myself what I said in class and sometimes to require my students to watch specific videos as assigned “readings” when we get behind or to leave more room for discussion in class. 

The first few videos are indeed a wash. I won’t be posting them anywhere! But the quality does improve, the content is, I think, pretty good, and, if you speed up the video to at least 1.5x speed, you can get beyond my stilted delivery. It occurred to me that there might be some value in posting some of them to my YouTube channel and linking to them on this blog. 

I intend to keep this post updated as an index page as I upload more videos:

• Purity and Impurity in Second Temple Judaism - The first video, from about two-thirds of the way through the course, is on the ancient Jewish purity system. As it happens, I originally created a blog post about the video back in 2020. That post has been updated with a link to the YouTube version of the video. As I mention there, anyone interested in the topic should now subscribe to Logan Williams’ and Paul Sloan’s excellent “Jesus and Jewish Law” podcast.

Remembering Carl Conrad

Members of the B-Greek forum have been posting tributes in memory of Carl Conrad, the forum's long-time co-moderator, who passed away on February 20th at the age of 90:

AKMA: "Carl was a mighty man of old of the B-Greek mailing list, back when it was strictly a mailing list, and we all learned much from him — many of us about Greek, but all of us about how to conduct ourselves with grace and patience in a mixed group of international scholars, intermediate and beginning students, autodidact experts, axe-grinding non-experts, and wayfaring strangers. ... I know my colleagues all well enough; I can estimate what they might say, how they’re likely to respond to an argument. I never dared assume I could anticipate what Carl would make of my ideas, not because he was arbitrary or capricious, but because his judgement was so much more richly funded with knowledge of the texts and with the experience of worked through them and taught them so fully and carefully. I'm surrounded by great classicists here [at Oxford], all of them erudite and judicious. And I still think of Carl as my Greek-analytical conscience."

Steve Runge: "His insights regularly filled in gaps, highlighted broader patterns, or shattered ill-formed ideas (including mine), always in the name of deepening our understanding of and appreciation for ancient Greek. I came to rely on his instincts as an early sanity check or corrective for the discourse features I sought to describe. He was one of the loudest voices in my head when I wrote. ... His persistence, curiosity, attention to detail, patience, respect for those with whom he disagreed, incredible memory, and an insatiable thirst to learn indelibly shaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar."

Randy Leedy: "The unflagging persistence with which he responded to nearly every imaginable question on B-Greek is a tribute to his dedication as a teacher. Those who did not know the forum during its heydey probably can't imagine the workload that his fully engaged participation entailed. And if you knew Carl, you know that his replies were not terse: he regularly expanded the discussion into realms that the questioner had not even been aware of but that were important for adequate perspective to understand the fullest possible answer that Carl wanted to provide. The hours required for such thoughtful interaction with such a large number of discussions must have mounted well beyond 10,000--likely double that--over the years. All free of charge, as a public service, out of his love for the language and its students."

Jonathan Robie: "Carl welcomed me graciously, answered my questions, suggested better ways to go about studying the language, and even putting me in contact with other people who could help. I never felt like he was talking down to me. He was always the consummate teacher, taking the time to understand how I was thinking about something before suggesting other ways that might be more helpful. For me, that was at least as important as his vast knowledge and deep intuitive grasp of the Greek language."

I first encountered Carl when I joined the B-Greek email list (as it was then) as a young seminary student. (I am still embarrassed by my claim to be a "Greek scholar" on a survey Carl conducted in 1997.) A short while later I came across a reference to Carl's unpublished Harvard PhD dissertation from 1964, which seemed like a long time ago, though it is now almost as long since I joined the list!

Carl's "Observations on Ancient Greek Voice" (originally posted to the list in 1997) anticipated a spate of publications on the subject by others in the early 2000's and shaped my own thinking on the topic. His enthusiasm for a living approach to learning ancient Greek served as strong validation for those of us "Little Greeks" moving in that direction.