Using Josef Pieper's Leisure as a point of departure, the contributors to this volume share a mutual concern for the diminishing role of the liberal arts in Catholic higher education. The overwhelming impression they share is that U.S. Catholic universities, with notable exceptions, have forgotten the very goal of university education, and especially Catholic university education: to aid in forming young men and women to pursue the truth and helping them to become freer persons.

This book explores entanglements between politics and leisure, ranging from the electorate’s concerns with public recreation resources, to the presence of politics in casual conversation, and to the use of leisure as a means of preserving racial hierarchies in society. In noting the contributions of past scholarship, it also points toward a trend of increasingly political leisure research, where research helps to unpack the multiple ways in which power suffuses the experience of leisure. A contrast between ‘being political’, on one hand, and the tribal politicization that characterizes much of contemporary social life, on the other hand, demonstrates that scholars and educators can and should be engaged in politically-oriented scholarship, while also building a more diverse and intellectually productive academy. This edited volume will be of great interest to researchers and scholars interested in race, power, polarization, and the interrelationship between politics and leisure. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Leisure Sciences.

Leisure is a genealogy of the concept of leisure, from its peak in the classical age to its inversion and fall in modern liberalism. The goal of this genealogy is to analyze models of leisure and to inquire into the potential future shape of it. In that process, Jacob T. Snyder asks: what was leisure in its peak form in the classical age? In such a form, how was leisure understood to be connected to human flourishing? Then, what happened to leisure? What was the argument for work that won over the West? What must be rejected, or lost, about work if leisure is to be reanimated? In asking and answering these questions, Snyder argues that political reform, such as limiting work weeks, is insufficient to make us leisured. Leisure demands more, including a new understanding of what makes us happy and thriving creatures.

Leisure has always been associated with freedom, choice and flexibility. The week-end and vacations were celebrated as ′time off′. In his compelling new book, Chris Rojek turns this shibboleth on its head to demonstrate how leisure has become a form of labour. Modern men and women are required to be competent, relevant and credible, not only in the work place but with their mates, children, parents and communities. The requisite empathy for others, socially acceptable values and correct forms of self-presentation demand work. Much of this work is concentrated in non-work activity, compromising traditional connections between leisure and freedom. Ranging widely from an analysis of the inflated aspirations of the leisure society thesis to the culture of deception that permeates leisure choice, Rojek shows how leisure is inextricably linked to emotional labour and intelligence. It is now a school for life. In challenging the orthodox understandings of freedom and free time, The Labour of Leisure sets out an indispensable new approach to the meaning of leisure. Chris Rojek is Professor of Sociology and Culture at Brunel University. In 2003 he was awarded the Allen V. Sapora Award for outstanding achievement in the field of leisure studies.

Introduction to Recreation and Leisure, Second Edition, is a textbook designed for an initial undergraduate course in a recreation and leisure program. With its 21st-century views of recreation and leisure services, it incorporates indicators for future directions in the field and presents international perspectives as well as career opportunities in recreation and leisure. A new web resource is included.

There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing, producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this cyberleisure geography. This book investigates the digital public sphere by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital commons. This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through multiple forms of public parks such as Protest Parks, Walled Gardens, Corporate Parks, Fantasy Parks, and Global Parks, addressing issues such as virtual activism, online privacy/surveillance, digital labor, branding, and globalization of digital networks. Ranging from the 19th century British factory garden to Tokyo Disneyland, this book offers numerous spatial metaphors to bring to life aspects of new media spaces. Readers looking for an interdisciplinary, historical and spatial approach to staid Web 2.0 discourses will undoubtedly benefit from this text.

In The March of Spare Time, Susan Currell explores how and why leisure became an object of such intense interest, concern, and surveillance during the Great Depression. As Americans experienced record high levels of unemployment, leisure was thought by reformers, policy makers, social scientists, physicians, labor unions, and even artists to be both a cause of and a solution to society's most entrenched ills. Of all the problems that faced America in the 1930s, only leisure seemed to offer a panacea for the rest. The problem centered on divided opinions over what constituted proper versus improper use of leisure time. On the one hand, sociologists and reformers excoriated as improper such leisure activities as gambling, loafing, and drinking. On the other, the Works Progress Administration and the newly professionalized recreation experts promoted proper leisure activities such as reading, sports, and arts and crafts. Such attention gave rise to new ideas about how Americans should spend their free time to better themselves and their nation. These ideas were propagated in social science publications and proliferated into the wider cultural sphere. Films, fiction, and radio also engaged with new ideas about leisure, more extensively than has previously been recognized. In examining this wide spectrum of opinion, Currell offers the first full-scale account of the fears and hopes surrounding leisure in the 1930s, one that will be an important addition to the cultural history of the period.