Leisure Resurrected
Rekindling the Fire of Early Christian Communities
Foreword by Rowan Williams and Walter Brueggemann
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
As the church emerges from the impact of COVID, how will it reimagine its mission? With all the disruption COVID caused comes an opportunity for congregations. How will the local church organize itself, engage with the neighborhood and world, and offer pastoral care to a planet dealing with the significant issues heightened during COVID? Returning to old patterns of behavior is a wasted chance. A theological opportunity for the church lies in rediscovering the classical aim of leisure.
The early church during the first two centuries offers us an understanding of leisure quite unique from the dominant expressions of leisure, such as Greek schole, Roman otium, and the Jewish Sabbath. By exploring early Christian practices, we can find insights about leisure for mission today. These practices include setting aside a single day of the week to worship, sharing in a common meal open to all, and, following the meal, incorporating into nonwork time care and engagement in the health and vitality of the community in the name of Jesus Christ. The followers of Jesus were consistent, if extraordinary, in meeting weekly, on the Lord's Day, to worship, eat together, and go out into the neighborhood to live out their faith.
Jeff Crittenden is an assistant professor of Homiletics at Huron University in London, Ontario, the senior minister of Metropolitan United Church in London, Ontario, and the founder and director of the Centre for Practical Theology (Canada).
“Half a century ago I sat in the lectures of Josef Pieper in Munster/Westphalia. You could buy his book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, in drugstores, yet in those heady activist days, only a handful of students attended his long, learned lectures. But maybe the worm of history has turned! Jeffrey Crittenden’s book makes one think so—and gladly!”
—Douglas John Hall, professor emeritus of theology, McGill University
“Jeffrey Crittenden’s book opens up a whole new ‘window’ through which we can view the earliest Christian communities. Until now, ‘leisure studies’ has never figured on the horizon of New Testament/Early Christian studies. This book demonstrates that how the first followers of Jesus viewed leisure is an important insight into their discipleship and practice—and ours.”
—Thomas O’Loughlin, professor emeritus of historical theology, University of Nottingham
“In the skilled hands of Jeffrey Crittenden, leisure becomes something surprising and brilliant. It is not just free time, it is an attitude towards life, a transformational way of being, the product of thoughtful decisions about how we want to live. Most importantly, from a Christian perspective, it is a resurrection activity, centered around a meal to which all are invited by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to live in true community, one with another.”
―Paul Scott Wilson, professor emeritus of homiletics, College of Victoria University, University of Toronto
“In an age when we badly need to recover of a good theology of work and leisure, Jeffrey Crittenden’s Leisure Resurrected takes us back to the early centuries of Christianity to seek alternative insights and recover views from a variety of settings, particularly liturgy. This excellent book challenges us and offers ways in which we can re-examine a theology of leisure.”
—Robert Gibbons, professor of Eastern Christianity, Graduate Theological Union
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