Contemplation and Leisure

Douglas Steere once wrote a pamphlet called Work and Contemplation that became a pocket-piece for the Quaker Work Camps, and was reprinted again and again. Later his Rauschenbusch Lectures were published under the same title. In both of these explorations he concluded that work tends to have its frame of meaning bled out of it and to become destructive unless this meaning is restored by contemplation. Contemplation, on the other hand, should be searched and tested by work, for only in actio...