Contemplate
Toward an Expansive Heart (Beyond Our Instincts I)
Jacob Riyeff
Paperback
ISBN 9781966608011
$22.00 US
eBook available
December 2, 2025
“We have a contemplation problem,” and here’s what to do about it.
Jacob Riyeff draws on 1,600 years of contemplative tradition in the West to show how humans are contemplative beings, what it means to contemplate in different areas of life, and how embracing a contemplative life can help lead anyone to a fuller experience of self, world, and communion with the Divine.
This is a volume of “spiritual theology,” using theological principles and understandings but exploring how to apply those principles and understandings to shape one’s daily living. Drawing on the ways that John Cassian, St. Benedict, Gregory the Great, William of Saint-Thierry, Dame Gertrude More, and others shaped and passed on the Christian inheritance, Contemplate brings this directly to bear on contemporary social and cultural situations. It seeks to answer the question, what does the contemplative tradition of the Latin west have to offer Christians living post-industrial, digitally-saturated, ecologically fraught lives?
This book is first in a new series, “Beyond Our Instincts”: succinct, multi-disciplinary, countercultural stances in an environment that sells us the idea that happiness is whatever you want now. These authors—all scholars of religion who are also religiously involved—suggest there are more important things, including some we may have forgotten.
Coming in future publishing seasons:
*Join (being together; refusing too much solitariness)
*Imagine (on opting out of technique-obsessed culture)
*Wait (the lost value of open questions and not-knowing)
Jacob Riyeff is a Milwaukee Catholic and a Benedictine oblate with Osage Deanery in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, with interests in interreligious dialogue, eco-spirituality, and world literature. He received a PhD in English literature from the University of Notre Dame, concentrating in medieval literature, and is a teaching associate professor at Marquette University. His first book, The Old English Rule of St. Benedict, won the 2019 award for best edition or translation of an Anglo-Saxon text from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, and his essays and poems appear regularly in a variety of journals and magazines. He lives in Milwaukee, WI.
“Drawing on a thorough knowledge of the literature on contemplation, his personal experience, and teaching skills, Jacob Riyeff has written an engaging and alluring introduction to what contemplation is, why we need it, and how to go about doing it. His use of the soul as a key idea, his suggestion that contemplation of other living creatures is particularly helpful in today’s culture, and his incisive critique of living digitally all enrich the book.” —Fr. Hugh Feiss, OSB, monk of Monastery of the Ascension in Jerome, Idaho and scholar of medieval monasticism
“Jacob Riyeff steps out from behind his great gifts as editor and translator to bring his poetic sensibilities to prose in this delightful collection. He is one of those lay people whose erudition about the spiritual life and history of monasticism and the contemplative tradition is the envy of many professed religious. A very welcome addition to the literature on the praxis of prayer and meditation.” —Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam, Prayer in the Cave of the Heart and Rediscovering the Divine; Secretary General for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, Rome
For the author’s earlier book:
“‘Adaming creation beyond the Fall,’ Jacob Riyeff—a Blakean hybrid of poet, mystic, and illuminator—brings us a new collection that visits Paul the hermit in the desert—but still has time to paddle his daughter out past the breakers under an afternoon sun. We see touches of earthy Kerouac, of nature-loving Wordsworth, all against a soaring, ancient spirituality.” —Amit Majmudar, author of Twin A and What He Did in Solitary
“This book offers a welcome collection of prayers and devotions. There are texts here for everyone. I sincerely hope this book will find a home in many libraries and collections of people of faith.” —Abbot Primate Gregory J. Polan, OSB, Badia Primaziale Sant’Anselmo, Rome
“Riyeff offers today’s reader a way to be acquainted and united with Benedictine devotional prayer across the centuries.” —Sr. Judith Sutera, OSB, Mount Saint Scholastica; editor of Magistra
