A salient feature of the modern economy is that the meaning of work has been reduced to its most basic economic function: providing an income for the worker and serving as a factor of production for business. But to get better traction on the growing crisis about work, we need to retrieve the deeper meaning of work—its place in a life with purpose and its role in contributing to the life of the community. This article retrieves the thought of Thomas Aquinas as a framework for thinking about work and asks what the response to the pandemic reveals about our sense of purpose and our sense of community.
Mary L. Hirschfeld, "The Pandemic as Apocalypse: What the Last Two Years Have Revealed about Who We Are," Journal of Markets & Morality 25, no. 2 (2022): 289-300