What is Essential in Life
-First Things presents our 2020–2021 reading group to discuss works by Josef Pieper that focus on the themes of leisure, contemplation, festivity, and happiness. In a profound synthesis of these concepts, developed in several works, Pieper argues that the ultimate meaning of human life lies in contemplative activity, which finds its highest expression in festivity. Pieper describes the necessary prerequisites for such activity: an understanding of the world as created and an inner quiet that allows one to see reality and be “in tune with the world.”