Editor’s Note: It is with great joy that we release today Dominicana 65 (2022), the print edition of Dominicana, which is distinct from the content published biweekly on the blog. This year’s print volume considers the place of recreation and play in the Christian life—a theme that we hope offers a little something fun for everyone.

Please find below an abridged version of the introductory editorial, along with a PDF preview of the Table of Contents and one free article. To order a digital or print subscription, please click here. As always, we are deeply grateful for your support, all of which goes toward our religious and priestly formation.

May God bless you in these final days of Advent and throughout the Christmas season!

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Everyone loves to laugh, but no one lives for laughter. Rather, the human person lives to know and to love, and so he delights above all in knowing and loving the highest, most enduring things of reality, which transcend all laughing: the ultimate meaning of life, the true nature of love, the existence and inner life of God. Even the slightest knowledge of such things, St. Thomas Aquinas observes, brings us more delight than the most certain knowledge of lower things (Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 1). Yet too much time in contemplation tires our body-bound minds. This prompts us to seek refreshment in the lower delights of play and recreation, which reinvigorates us to ascend anew.

Thus enters the virtue of eutrapelia, which guides man in his pursuit of playing well. Taken in its broadest sense, eutrapelia is the virtue of recta recreatio—right recreation—whereby the human person is ennobled to pursue bodily exercise and spiritual mirth in the right proportions. Moreover, the eutrapelic person undertakes all of this with an eye to realizing his ultimate end and highest spiritual good: knowledge and love of God. Yes, even frivolity can and should be sanctified.

Dominicana 65 thus examines the perennial and particular questions pertinent to living the virtue of eutrapelia in our age. In the opening essay (available for free below), Br. Raymond La Grange introduces eutrapelia, its role in an integrated human life, and the challenge each person faces in determining the right amount of recreation for himself. Building on that foundation, Brs. Gregory Santy and Micah Kim consider how the liturgy and the Church’s Scriptures can respectively elevate our ordinary recreation. Complementing these pieces, Br. Christopher Daniel ponders God’s playfulness and its implications for our own play, while Br. Juan Macias Marquez offers us a translation of a Lenten conference on entertainment and the Christian life by the influential twentieth-century French Dominican, Fr. Marie-Albert Janvier, O.P., given in Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. 

Sports, of course, figure prominently in contemporary recreative culture. Br. Basil Burroughs traces the Anglo-Protestant origins of our modern athletic obsession, weaving together historical research with theological analysis and practical spiritual takeaways. Offering us an insight into the first-hand experience of elite athletics, Br. Thaddeus Pistrang interviews Fr. Chase Hilgenbrinck, a professional soccer player-turned-diocesan priest, who offers profound and candid lessons on the glories and challenges of professional sports.

The arts, too, have a basic recreative character. In “Lives of the Brethren,” Br. Bertrand Hebert interviews Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., who, as a Hillbilly Thomist and Rector Magnificus of the Angelicum, witnesses to the dynamic interplay between eutrapelia and study. In our art history feature, Br. Jeremiah Tobin explores some of the lively stories and moral lessons behind the peculiar marginalia that decorate medieval manuscripts, several of which line the pages of this journal.

Finally, each of our five book reviews relates to eutrapelia in some broader respect: Br. Thomas Nee assesses a “book” of songs—the most recent Hillbilly Thomists album, Holy Ghost Power—while Br. Cornelius Avaritt analyzes a study of love in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Br. Luke Neitzke presents our own Br. Columba Thomas’s The Art of Dying, a translation of the fifteenth-century Ars Moriendi. Brother Nicodemus Thomas connects Father Gregory Pine’s Prudence to the other cardinal virtues, while Br. Pius Henry inquires into the prudence and eutrapelia of Alex Honnold’s stunning free-solo summit of El Capitan, documented in The Impossible Climb.

For a journal about the nature of true fun, this project was truly fun to produce. In our effort to address today’s great recreative challenges, we hope that Dominicana 65 might help readers to delight both in knowing more about eutrapelia and in actually becoming more virtuous. By the grace of God, such rectified recreation will yet deepen “his joy in us” and so lead us toward eternal delights, where our “joy may be complete” (John 15:11).

Click to view the Table of Contents and Argument and Br. Raymond’s “Finding Time for Fun with the Virtue of Eutrapelia.”

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Image: Rutland Psalter, 78v