The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) is please to announce that Charter Fellow Douglas Ambrose will direct a reading group on Josef Pieper on the Hamilton College campus, Kirner Johnson Building, room 138, from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM on the following Thursdays:  February 26, March 9, April 9, and April 30.  Those interested in joining the group should contact Professor Doug Ambrose, who will be leading the discussion dambrose@hamilton.edu.

The AHI’s Christopher Dawson Society for the Study of Faith and Reason is sponsoring a reading group on Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.  The AHI has generously provided free copies of the book to those interested in joining the group.

T. S. Eliot was not only one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, but also a leading Christian cultural critic.  His Christianity and Culture remains a profound exploration about the nature of Christian commitment in contemporary society.  Eliot considered his contemporary, Josef Pieper (1904-1997), a German Catholic philosopher, a leading voice in the effort to answer what Eliot saw as the fundamental question of our time: “what—if any—is the ‘idea’ of the society in which we live? to what end is it arranged?’”  In his introduction to Pieper’s classic work, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Eliot wrote that Pieper’s “influence should be in the direction of restoring philosophy to a place of importance for every educated person who thinks, instead of confining it to esoteric activities which can affect the public only indirectly, insidiously, and often in distorted form. 

[Pieper] restores to their position in philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: insight and wisdom.“