Fred Stella converses with Jacob Riyeff, who 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.
His book "Contemplate: Toward an Expansive Heart" 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?
——
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.
