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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
This essay discusses the use of Dorothy L. Sayers' essay “Why Work?” (1942) in a Freshman Seminar that inaugurates a four-year structured core curriculum in a Catholic liberal arts university. After a synopsis of Sayers' argument, it enumerates some contributions that her essay can make to a Catholic liberal arts education in (1) directing students' attention to the goods intrinsic to work, (2) situating work in a theological perspective, (3) introducing the idea that the worker's relationship to God is internal to the work, and (4) addressing work in terms of vocation. It concludes by considering some difficulties encountered in teaching Sayers' essay.
1 It was first published as a booklet, Why Work? An Address Delivered at Eastbourne April 23rd, 1942 (London: Methuen, 1942), and later included in Sayers', collection Creed or Chaos? I am citing the American edition of the latter ([New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949], 46–62Google Scholar) and will include page references in the text. The essay is now available in Sayers, , Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 125–46.Google Scholar
2 Other relevant works of Sayers, include The Mind of the Maker (1941; reprint, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979)Google Scholar, especially its postscript, “The Worth of the Work,” 217–25; a portion of the title essay of Creed or Chaos? (42–44); “Vocation in Work,” in Baker, A. E., ed., A Christian Basis for the Post-War World (New York: Morehouse-Gorham, 1942), 89–105Google Scholar; “Living to Work,” in Sayers', Unpopular Opinions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 150–55.Google Scholar See also Eads, Martha Greene, “The Mystery of Vocation,” in “Inklings of Glory,” Christian Reflection, Issue 2, 2004: 59–67, http://www3.baylor.edu/christianethics/Inklings.pdf.Google Scholar
3 Students often miss the point of the squirrel-wheel analogy, taking it to mean that work is boring and repetitive. But to the squirrel, the wheel, though repetitive, is not boring.
4 McCarthy, David Matzko, The Good Life: Genuine Christianity for the Middle Class (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004), 120.Google Scholar
5 A Google search for “collectibles” yielded thirty-six million hits; for “collectibles,” six million.
6 Sayers assumes rather than develops this theology in “Why Work?” but the thesis of her book The Mind of the Maker, published the year before the essay, is that “Christian statements about God the Creator … embody a very exact description of the human mind while engaged in an act of creative imagination” (xiii).
7 Pieper, Josef, in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Malsbury, Gerald (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 1998)Google Scholar, holds that a very similar statement, quoted by Max Weber from Count Zinzendorf, “turns the order of things upside-down” (4). But Sayers is much closer to Pieper's defense of the contemplative life than this might lead one to believe.
8 Cooperative Institutional Research Program (University of California, Los Angeles). Alexander Astin heads the survey.
9 The other required reading on work in Freshman Seminar, the chapter “Work as Flow” from Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 1990)Google Scholar, if read superficially, can lend support to this position, in that it concentrates only on the worker's experience, not on the work that is done, though in fact Csikszentmihalyi is not far from Sayers on the question of what makes work satisfying.
10 Newman, John Henry, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill,” Discourse VII of The Idea of a University (New York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1959Google Scholar [original ed. 1852]), 170–92.
11 For present purposes, there is no need to distinguish Sayers' Anglo-Catholicism from Roman Catholicism. Her argument parallels what some Roman Catholics, such as Eric Gill, were saying at the time, and it draws explicitly on the work of the Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Nor am I arguing that Sayers' point of view is incompatible with other forms of Christianity or without relevance to non-Christian perspectives (Buddhist parallels come to mind). I am simply confining myself to the context of Catholic liberal arts education.
12 Translation in Flannery, Austin, ed., Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (Northport, NY: Costello, 1996).Google Scholar
13 The Gaudium et Spes chapter continues beyond Sayers in evoking the end-time kingdom of Christ, the “new heavens and new earth” that God is preparing for us. The council declares that, far from being of no account in light of the world to come, or mere means to get us there (the usual student view, if they have one at all), our works will actually be part of what will make that kingdom what it is, only they will be cleansed and perfected by God (39). This theme has been completely new to just about every student to whom I have taught it.
14 Weil, Simone, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in her Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951) 63, 62.Google Scholar
15 The Mind of the Maker, 39.
16 Parks, Sharon Daloz, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), xi.Google Scholar
17 Lumen Gentium 31.
18 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar, which I am oversimplifying considerably.
19 McCarthy, 119.
20 From a final examination in one of my classes in spring 2005.
21 Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).Google Scholar
22 McCarthy, 120.