Latest news with #Pieper
Time of India
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Auerbachs Keller: Haunt of Luther and Goethe turns 500
Representative Image Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig is one of the most famous restaurants in the world. Every year, 36,000 homemade beef roulades are eaten here. About 90,000 liters (190,000 pints) of beer and just as much wine are also served. "We have around 300,000 guests a year, many of them from abroad," Tanja Pieper, spokeswoman and anniversary ambassador for the storied cellar restaurant, told DW. Even more impressive than the quantities consumed at the venue is the fact that, about 250 years ago, Auerbachs Keller partly inspired the first part of the great drama "Faust: A Tragedy," by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The scene from "Faust" that takes place in the restaurant attracts Goethe admirers from all over the world to Leipzig to this day. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 2025 Top Trending local enterprise accounting software [Click Here] Esseps Learn More Undo Auerbach: A friend of Martin Luther 's During Easter 1525, Leipzig physician and university professor Heinrich Stromer von Auerbach served wine to students in his Keller — German for cellar — for the first time. He was friends with the church reformer Martin Luther, who also frequented Auerbachs Keller in the early 16th century and is said to have hidden there from his enemies at times. The key 500-year anniversary celebrations were held during Easter this year, and included the so-called great feast. "We copied this from Goethe," Pieper said. "There is a big 'Schlampamp,' a feast, the trinity of eating, drinking and good company." "We celebrate at long tables like in the old days," Pieper said, describing how food is served on boards and in bowls as in the 18th century. Goethe's 'Faust' set in Auerbach's Keller Goethe's drama is about the aging melancholy teacher Heinrich Faust, who sells his soul to the devil Mephisto to become a young man: the "Faustian bargain." Faust gets a new zest for life but is not free of Mephisto's evil. When Faust seduces and impregnates the young Margarete, for example, she kills her illegitimate child, is arrested and waits in prison for God's redemption. Mephisto is also up to mischief in the scene set in Auerbachs Keller. Wanting to bring Faust "into merry company," he conjures up delicious wine in front of a few drinking companions before riding out of the cellar on a wine barrel. For 30 years, actor Hartmut Müller has been taking guests through a popular "barrel cellar ceremony" tour in the restaurant's barrel cellar, 9 meters (30 feet) below ground. As the "barrel cellar master," he guides visitors through the history and vaults of the building. "At an advanced hour, we then go through a separate door from this barrel cellar back down to the witches' kitchen," Pieper said, describing a small hovel 12 meters underground. This is where the guests — like Faust in Goethe's drama — are given a rejuvenating drink. Inspired by the Dr. Faustus legend Goethe did not invent his Faustian barrel ride; the idea is derived from an early-16th-century folk tale of the magician Dr. Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil for special powers. In the barrel cellar, Goethe saw two wooden panels from 1625 illustrating Dr. Faustus' legendary barrel ride. He is said to have observed how transporters tried to maneuver an overweight barrel out of the wine cellar and made fun of them. He bet that he could ride the barrel out. "Goethe was so fascinated by these two wooden panels that hung there that he wrote us into the 'Faust' drama," Pieper said. In the 18th century, the restaurant was still purely a wine bar. In those days, wine was not bottled, but served from barrels stored in the cellar. There was no cooking in Auerbachs Keller until the 19th century, Pieper said. 'Bach's Faust' at the Leipzig Bach Festival One of the anniversary events is "Bach's Faust," a kind of musical comedy by Bach Festival director Michael Maul. Johann Sebastian Bach was Cantor of St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig from 1723 until the end of his life in 1750. His daily commute to work also took him past Auerbachs Keller. Every year in June, the city celebrates the Bach Festival in Bach's honor. "A lot of music is mentioned in Goethe's Faust, without Goethe specifying exactly what it is," Maul told DW. Goethe greatly appreciated Bach's music, said Maul, whose play is appropriately accompanied with chorales and cantatas by Bach. The world premiere of "Bach's Faust" with singers, musicians and actors will take place as part of the Bach Festival on June 15 in the large hall of Auerbachs Keller. The anniversary of the historic restaurant will be celebrated throughout the year.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. As a professor, my primary vocation is to teach young adults skills that will prepare them to excel in their careers. The implicit assumption society makes is that professional excellence requires formal training, whereas excellence in the rest of life does not. There is no Harvard School of Leisure, after all. Work demands discipline and training; nonwork is easy and enjoyable and comes naturally. Our higher-education system, including my university, operates on this assumption. But to me, it's very questionable. Leisure is not at all straightforward or easy. I have no interest in frittering away a minute of my day on fruitless pursuits. I want everything I do to be generative. I want to use my nonwork activities, as much as my work ones, to become a wiser, happier, more effective, better person. Leisure is serious business. My attitude is not, in fact, especially original: The 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper believed that when we understand and practice leisure properly, we can achieve our best selves—and even our capacity to transform society for the better. But to do leisure like this, we must treat it with every bit as much seriousness as we do our careers. [Arthur C. Brooks: How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever] Given their observable behavior, people evidently believe that leisure is desirable. As Aristotle reasoned in his Nicomachean Ethics, 'We toil that we may rest, and war that we may be at peace.' When our work is most demanding, we typically define leisure as its opposite: complete inactivity. For example, when the burned-out 51-year-old CEO of a $68 billion investment firm abruptly quit his job in 2022, he explained to reporters what he planned to do next: 'I just want to go sit at the beach and do nothing.' Even if we're not finding our work overtaxing, we still talk about taking a break from it that will allow us to reenergize—in order to work more and better. Either way, we're defining leisure in relation to work, as the absence of work or as an adjunct to work. Pieper rejected this whole way of thinking. A follower of Plato and Thomas Aquinas, Pieper believed that leisure was an inherently valuable, constructive part of life, and he thought we misunderstood leisure when we defined it as work's opposite. In his 1948 book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he described it as an attitude of openness to the world through deep contemplation. In Pieper's conception, the opposite of leisure is not work, but acedia, an ancient-Greek word that means spiritual or mental sloth. Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin'. It is a serious business, and if you don't do leisure well, you will never find life's full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such 'acediac' activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships. Pieper especially focused on faith experiences, because he believed that 'culture lives on religion through divine worship.' Perhaps you have never thought of going to a house of worship as leisure, but Pieper would say that's because you never took your leisure seriously enough. You might be thinking that this approach to leisure doesn't sound especially fun to you, not so chill, but social scientists' findings suggest that Pieper knew a thing or two about well-being. We may intuitively think that the best way to get happier is, like the CEO, to 'go sit at the beach and do nothing.' But researchers have found that this kind of do-nothing leisure, including vacation travel, provides only minor, temporary boosts of happiness. What gives us more sustained well-being are pursuits involving social engagement, personal reflection, and outdoor activities. [Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle's 10 rules for a good life] The point here is that just as we should be excellent at our jobs, we should become excellent at leisure. Doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide. We need to take the time to dwell on life's big questions without distraction, to learn to appreciate what is beautiful, to transcend our workaday lives and consider what is divine. To achieve excellence at anything in life requires time, effort, and discipline. In this spirit, here are three ways to build your 'leisure aptitude.' 1. Structure your leisure. The Catholic bishop Fulton Sheen was famous throughout the United States as a radio and television star from the 1930s through the '60s. His lasting legacy, however, was instructing people to undertake what he called a 'Holy Hour' of prayer, scripture reading, and meditation each day. He advised everyone whose schedule permitted it to keep this practice at the same time every day and for the whole hour. Millions of priests and laity still do so to this day, and people swear by it as one of the most helpful parts of their faith. Whether you are religious or not, consider observing your own Holy Hour. Maybe it can be a time in the morning when you read something truly meaningful, or a walk after lunch when you leave your device behind, or a period of uninterrupted conversation after dinner with the person you love best. But structure this Holy Hour into your day as you would an important work meeting. 2. Don't fritter away your leisure. One of the biggest killers of productive leisure is the inability to get started. If you have an hour off, you might start by reading the news, then answering email messages … and before you know it, the time has passed in merely routine and forgettable activity. To avoid this, program the time in advance and get right into it. If the leisure activity is to read a certain book from 6 to 7 a.m., have the book ready, start promptly, and do absolutely nothing else. Put your phone on silent and out of reach, and block all distractions. This is crucial time. 3. Set specific leisure goals. Humans are inherently goal-oriented. In any area of personal improvement, whether your career or your health, goals—and making progress toward them—are central to staying motivated. For example, you probably won't be able to keep to an exercise plan unless you have the ambition to get stronger and healthier in a measurable way, and see regular, tangible advancement toward that end. Goal orientation should also apply to your leisure activities. Instead of randomly dipping into a holy book in your religious tradition, say, set about reading the entire volume in a year. Similarly, your goal for daily meditation might be to work toward a week-long silent retreat. Or if your leisure purpose is to listen to music, focus on a particular composer with an end in mind: Listen and learn about J. S. Bach every day, for example, with the goal of attending a summer Bach festival as an expert listener. [Derek Thompson: The free-time paradox in America] Pieper's philosophy of leisure offers more than a formula for organizing your own recreational time; it also asserts that leisure is 'the basis of culture.' How so? Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus—in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony. We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways. That is a culture of joy and interest I want to be part of. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-03-2025
- Lifestyle
- Atlantic
How to Be Excellent at Leisure
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. As a professor, my primary vocation is to teach young adults skills that will prepare them to excel in their careers. The implicit assumption society makes is that professional excellence requires formal training, whereas excellence in the rest of life does not. There is no Harvard School of Leisure, after all. Work demands discipline and training; nonwork is easy and enjoyable and comes naturally. Our higher-education system, including my university, operates on this assumption. But to me, it's very questionable. Leisure is not at all straightforward or easy. I have no interest in frittering away a minute of my day on fruitless pursuits. I want everything I do to be generative. I want to use my nonwork activities, as much as my work ones, to become a wiser, happier, more effective, better person. Leisure is serious business. My attitude is not, in fact, especially original: The 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper believed that when we understand and practice leisure properly, we can achieve our best selves—and even our capacity to transform society for the better. But to do leisure like this, we must treat it with every bit as much seriousness as we do our careers. Arthur C. Brooks: How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever Given their observable behavior, people evidently believe that leisure is desirable. As Aristotle reasoned in his Nicomachean Ethics, 'We toil that we may rest, and war that we may be at peace.' When our work is most demanding, we typically define leisure as its opposite: complete inactivity. For example, when the burned-out 51-year-old CEO of a $68 billion investment firm abruptly quit his job in 2022, he explained to reporters what he planned to do next: 'I just want to go sit at the beach and do nothing.' Even if we're not finding our work overtaxing, we still talk about taking a break from it that will allow us to reenergize—in order to work more and better. Either way, we're defining leisure in relation to work, as the absence of work or as an adjunct to work. Pieper rejected this whole way of thinking. A follower of Plato and Thomas Aquinas, Pieper believed that leisure was an inherently valuable, constructive part of life, and he thought we misunderstood leisure when we defined it as work's opposite. In his 1948 book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he described it as an attitude of openness to the world through deep contemplation. In Pieper's conception, the opposite of leisure is not work, but acedia, an ancient-Greek word that means spiritual or mental sloth. Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin'. It is a serious business, and if you don't do leisure well, you will never find life's full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such 'acediac' activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships. Pieper especially focused on faith experiences, because he believed that 'culture lives on religion through divine worship.' Perhaps you have never thought of going to a house of worship as leisure, but Pieper would say that's because you never took your leisure seriously enough. You might be thinking that this approach to leisure doesn't sound especially fun to you, not so chill, but social scientists' findings suggest that Pieper knew a thing or two about well-being. We may intuitively think that the best way to get happier is, like the CEO, to 'go sit at the beach and do nothing.' But researchers have found that this kind of do-nothing leisure, including vacation travel, provides only minor, temporary boosts of happiness. What gives us more sustained well-being are pursuits involving social engagement, personal reflection, and outdoor activities. Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle's 10 rules for a good life The point here is that just as we should be excellent at our jobs, we should become excellent at leisure. Doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide. We need to take the time to dwell on life's big questions without distraction, to learn to appreciate what is beautiful, to transcend our workaday lives and consider what is divine. To achieve excellence at anything in life requires time, effort, and discipline. In this spirit, here are three ways to build your 'leisure aptitude.' 1. Structure your leisure. The Catholic bishop Fulton Sheen was famous throughout the United States as a radio and television star from the 1930s through the '60s. His lasting legacy, however, was instructing people to undertake what he called a 'Holy Hour' of prayer, scripture reading, and meditation each day. He advised everyone whose schedule permitted it to keep this practice at the same time every day and for the whole hour. Millions of priests and laity still do so to this day, and people swear by it as one of the most helpful parts of their faith. Whether you are religious or not, consider observing your own Holy Hour. Maybe it can be a time in the morning when you read something truly meaningful, or a walk after lunch when you leave your device behind, or a period of uninterrupted conversation after dinner with the person you love best. But structure this Holy Hour into your day as you would an important work meeting. 2. Don't fritter away your leisure. One of the biggest killers of productive leisure is the inability to get started. If you have an hour off, you might start by reading the news, then answering email messages … and before you know it, the time has passed in merely routine and forgettable activity. To avoid this, program the time in advance and get right into it. If the leisure activity is to read a certain book from 6 to 7 a.m., have the book ready, start promptly, and do absolutely nothing else. Put your phone on silent and out of reach, and block all distractions. This is crucial time. 3. Set specific leisure goals. Humans are inherently goal-oriented. In any area of personal improvement, whether your career or your health, goals—and making progress toward them—are central to staying motivated. For example, you probably won't be able to keep to an exercise plan unless you have the ambition to get stronger and healthier in a measurable way, and see regular, tangible advancement toward that end. Goal orientation should also apply to your leisure activities. Instead of randomly dipping into a holy book in your religious tradition, say, set about reading the entire volume in a year. Similarly, your goal for daily meditation might be to work toward a week-long silent retreat. Or if your leisure purpose is to listen to music, focus on a particular composer with an end in mind: Listen and learn about J. S. Bach every day, for example, with the goal of attending a summer Bach festival as an expert listener. Derek Thompson: The free-time paradox in America Pieper's philosophy of leisure offers more than a formula for organizing your own recreational time; it also asserts that leisure is 'the basis of culture.' How so? Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus —in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony. We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways. That is a culture of joy and interest I want to be part of.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Yahoo
Former Wisconsin correctional officer charged with child exploitation and trafficking
ELKHORN, Wis. (WFRV) – A former Wisconsin correctional officer has been charged with sexual exploitation and trafficking of a child after an investigation revealed he allegedly paid for explicit images. According to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Samuel Pieper, a former correctional officer for the Walworth County Sheriff's Office, was charged Friday with two counts of sexual exploitation of a child and two counts of trafficking a child. Wisconsin man arrested for OWI, drug offenses after reported assault On March 6, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Pieper's residence. The warrant was prompted by tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about suspected child exploitation, involving financial transactions in exchange for videos or images from minors in June and July 2024. Former Wisconsin correctional guard charged with inmate abuse Pieper was arrested at the Walworth County Sheriff's Office and resigned from his position on the same day. No local victims have been identified at this time. Anyone with information related to the investigation is encouraged to contact the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force at (608) 266-1671. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
