As the Church has faced struggles in recent years, Pope Francis has repeatedly emphasized the role that journalists can play in the reform and renewal of the Church. But the mission of Catholics journalists is not always clear: they face the prophetic call of truth, and, at the same time, the common Christian vocation of the Great Commission. Can those work together? Can journalism be a form of evangelization? And can the Catholic Church teach the press something about the vocation of truth-telling in a polarized world? Reflecting on the work of Catholic journalism amid the Church's challenges, Pillar editor JD Flynn considers those questions.

In his well-known and influential essay, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper claims that we in modern western society have come to inhabit a “world of total work,” and that an essential precondition for escape is recapturing a more ancient notion of “leisure” (in Greek: scholê, in Latin: otium). While much has been said in support of this claim, especially in Catholic intellectual circles, the focus has typically centered on the nature of leisure, which much of this dialogue takes as the starting point. In this lecture, Prof. Blaschko, who studies the philosophy of work at Notre Dame, will proceed in a different direction, asking “What kind of culture, and what kind of work culture, would we create if we wanted to incorporate genuine leisure into our lives?”