Work and Contemplation

Work and Contemplation was published in 1957 by Douglas V. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College and was a leading figure in twentieth-century ecumenical dialogue. It grew out of the Harper Religious Book Club series and addresses a problem that postwar American life made acute: people were busy, productive, and increasingly worn thin, and they sensed that their working lives and their inner lives had come apart. Steere wrote for the person who believes that prayer matters and yet finds that the pace and structure of ordinary employment leave little room for it.

Steere's central claim is that work and contemplation are not rival claims on a limited supply of time but two movements that need each other. He draws on a wide circle of witnesses, including Meister Eckhart, Brother Lawrence, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, and the Quaker tradition of John Woolman, to show that Christians across the centuries have found ways to bring attentiveness to God into the middle of labor. Against the assumption that contemplation belongs only to monks and the retired, he argues that it is a capacity for every vocation, and that work offered in awareness of God is transformed rather than diminished. He is equally frank about the opposite danger: work pursued without any inward center becomes frantic and self-serving, and even good activity can crowd out the listening that gives it direction. The book moves between diagnosis of this divided condition and practical guidance on how a person might hold the two together, with attention to silence, to the rhythm of withdrawal and return, and to the way a settled inward life changes the quality of what one does with one's hands and mind.

The book has lasted because the problem it names has only intensified. Steere's reading of the mystical tradition is wide without being technical, and his tone is that of a patient friend rather than a spiritual authority. It remains a clear entry point into the lived relationship between vocation and prayer, and it shaped later Quaker and ecumenical writing on the contemplative life.

Who should read this: Anyone whose working life, paid or unpaid, leaves them feeling that prayer has been squeezed to the margins, and who wants guidance rooted in the Christian contemplative and Quaker traditions. It suits pastors, teachers, and professionals looking for an integrated account of vocation and devotion. It is not for readers wanting a step-by-step prayer method or a contemporary productivity framework, and its mid-century idiom and examples will feel dated to those who need a book about the digital workplace.