Moralizing Social Time and Leisure Through Scripture: Biblical Framing, Interpretive Mediation, and the Brazilian Leisure Studies Literature

This study examined how selected works in Brazilian leisure studies drew on biblical references, whether through direct citation of scriptural texts or through successive layers of philosophical and sociological mediation, to reproduce three recurrent moral frames: cessation, rest, and non-work equated with sloth and sin; labor as a divinely cursed condition; and labor as a path to salvation. These readings were assessed against the historical-literary contexts of the biblical passages invoked. Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to an intentional corpus of nine works in Brazilian leisure studies, combined with hermeneutic-exegetical examination of the biblical passages mobilized by those works. The study found a consistent gap between what the biblical texts assert within their original historical-literary contexts and what the analyzed works inferred from them. These readings derived from historically situated interpretations that, having circulated without return to primary sources, came to function as apparently direct evidence of biblical content.