Rethinking Work, with Paul Blaschko

Church Life Today

Do you or someone you know feel burned out by work? Have you questioned the place of work in your life, and how it balances with everything else? Do we work to live? Do we live to work? Do we reach for and sometimes touch value that is in our work and also somehow beyond our work? What is the meaning of work?Here’s another question: Can philosophy help us find meaning and purpose at work? That is a question that my guest has been asking, and he is helping college students and other people out there in the world to think about and investigate the meaning and the good of work.Paul Blaschko is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he now also serves as director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society within the College of Arts & Letters. Dr. Blaschko is deeply committed to matters of practical philosophy, and of doing philosophy in public, helping others to engage the world philosophically, as a way of life. In the past couple years, he developed and has been teaching a wildly successful course for undergraduate students on “The Working Life.” He is also now building a program focused on finding meaning in business through the liberal arts. Along with Meghan Sullivan, Dr. Blaschko is the author of The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. He joins me today to talk about what’s going on with work, how we think about and approach work, and what difference developing a personal philosophy of work would make.

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