{from, the Nov. 22-23 '08, 'WSJ' online}
 
"The Peculiar Life of Sundays"
By Stephen Miller
Harvard, 310 pages, $27.95
 
Who, raised in or around the Christian tradition, has not experienced the ambivalent dolors of a Sunday? That is only one question -- but a central and recurrent one -- raised by "The Peculiar Life of Sundays," Stephen Miller's lively history of a day that has exercised a peculiar hold on countless human beings for the past 2,000 years.
 
One might think that, for the devout, this hold would be especially firm. For them, after all, the day is unquestionably holy, unquestionably the Lord's: an Easter in miniature marking their savior's resurrection. But even the faithful can feel uneasy, as Mr. Miller shows by depicting the spiritual struggles of many of his exemplary figures.
 
Consider Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century essayist, conversationalist and one-man dictionary compiler. A committed Anglican and forthright defender of the faith, he nevertheless found it difficult -- indeed, almost impossible -- to haul himself into church on Sundays. Uncomfortable with "publick Worship," bored by most sermons and inclined toward late-rising, Johnson was forever recording his resolution to attend church more conscientiously. But that vow "was little better kept than the others," as the editor of his diaries noted. Without saying so explicitly, Mr. Miller uses Johnson to show how even a deeply religious person can find the outward institutional form of his religion at odds with what he finds most sacred.
 
Johnson's internal struggle, Mr. Miller implies, is part of a much larger culture war within the world that was once, until its 16th-century fragmentation, called Christendom. At the center of that struggle have been conflicting efforts to define the doctrines and practices of a religion based on the life, death and reputed resurrection of a first-century Palestinian Jew, proclaimed by many of his followers as the unique son of the Hebrew God. Inevitably the struggle has involved -- and, yes, to this day still involves -- politics, powerful personalities, sectarian rivalries and other human, all too human, factors.
 
 
In 321, eight years after making Christianity legal in the western half of the Roman Empire that he ruled, Emperor Constantine declared Sunday (dies Solis) a public holiday so that Christians could rest on what they called the Lord's Day {"dies Domini"}. Constantine thus strengthened a distinction that many early Christians had started to make between the Jewish Sabbath and their own holiest day of the week, the day after the Jewish Sabbath and, according to the New Testament, the day of Jesus' resurrection. In the interests of institution-building, early Christian bishops may have also promoted the idea of a Christian "Sabbath" to separate their sect even more sharply from its Jewish source.
 
As Mr. Miller reminds us, this would not be the last example of Christians using Sunday to make sectarian points. The day would become an important symbolic feature of the struggles among Protestants and Catholics in 16th- and 17th-century England. Church and government officials with low-church, evangelical inclinations would push for strictures on Sunday conduct {no tavern-going, no fun or games}; others, of a high-church disposition, would lobby for a laissez-faire tolerance of convivial pursuits, believing that good Christians could enjoy their holy day (or holiday) while also dutifully observing it.
 
“Sunday is not a gloomy day for most Americans … Yet many American painters and writers, including Hawthorne, Twain, and Edith Wharton, have described Sunday in gloomy terms.” Read an excerpt from "The Peculiar Life of Sundays"
 
In 1618, King James I issued a three-page pamphlet, "The Book of Sports," enumerating Sunday recreations -- including mixed dancing, archery and ale-drinking -- that were lawful "after the end of divine service." Originally intended to curb Catholics and their more freewheeling attitude toward Sundays, the pamphlet ended up provoking Puritans -- particularly after William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, ordered that it be read out in all churches. Laud's order created such sectarian turmoil that Parliament eventually ordered that the pamphlet be burned.
 
As Christianity continued to fragment and as Christian churches lost their privileged status within nations, free-thinkers during the Enlightenment grew more brazen in their attacks on religious "superstition" and religious restrictions. They called {à la Thomas Jefferson} for more rational religion or even no religion at all. Defiant apostates appeared to rid themselves entirely of the lingering bad conscience that came with abandoning traditional Sunday obligations.
 
Yet the exultations of a writer like Henry David Thoreau sometimes make him sound like a person who doth protest too much. Lamenting the ways in which modern man breaks faith with his true nature, Thoreau wrote: "Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches." The sun-worshipping pantheist urged his readers to embrace every day as a sun day, a "natural Sabbath." Like Nietzsche, Thoreau kept the Judeo-Christian God alive by battering him so relentlessly. And by battering the notion of a Lord's Day as well.
 
We who have seen the secularizing confidence of progressive intellectuals challenged by the world-wide resurgence of religion -- and who find ourselves feeling a certain ambivalence about Sundays -- might profit from revisiting Wallace Stevens's haunting poem "Sunday Morning," a work to which Mr. Miller devotes a thoughtful reading toward the end of "The Peculiar Life of Sundays." The reflections of the poem's central figure -- a woman in her peignoir trying to enjoy a leisurely, unchurched morning -- could be those of any good post-Christian secularist who can't entirely resist the tug of old-time religion. Sipping her coffee, savoring an orange, musing on a green-feathered cockatoo woven into the pattern of her rug, she feels the day pulling her back to "that old catastrophe" enacted in "silent Palestine, / Dominion of blood and sepulcher."
[The Peculiar Life of Sundays]
 
The great question of the poem, left unanswered as it truthfully must be, is whether the ephemeral rewards of the natural world are sufficient consolation for inevitable death. Feeling pangs of mortality and longing for "some imperishable bliss," the woman nevertheless finally rejects the promise of eternal life on the grounds that change and beauty are dependent on finitude. "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?" The thought of such eternal monotony forces her -- and probably Stevens -- to recoil from what religion promises. Here, though, there is no Thoreau-like defiance or bravado but a resigned acceptance of nature -- of both its limits and its power to evoke in us perishable beings a longing for religious transcendence, however impossible it may seem.
 
 
Sunday in increasingly multicultural America will probably lose even more of its strict sabbatarian character, but Mr. Miller doubts that its specialness will ever be entirely lost. The day is now one on which great numbers of Americans explore our great spiritual bazaar, looking for what suits them best. Some young Christians, for example, uncomfortable with the older denominations, now partake in the so-called emergent-community movement, designing worship services that are intended to blend traditional elements {including sacraments} with an atmosphere and setting of everyday casualness and spontaneity. A leaderless, sermon-free Sunday morning Eucharist in a coffee shop with bits of bagels offered as the sacramental host: Now that is a service that might have lured even Samuel Johnson from his nice, warm bed.
 
{Mr. Tolson, a former senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, will become the news director at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in December}.
 

Why do you post these long diatribes which clearly no one reads? Ever notice how most all of these posts remain less the 5 comments if that.
 
Reason.
 
No one in their right mind is going to read this long of an article on a chess website. Time has proven though, that there is a handful of individuals who will take the time to read lengthy writings that someone has actually written.
 
Here's an idea.
 
Give us your opinions (if you have any) along with a snippet such as a sentence or paragraph. I bet you'll have more readers that way. Well, you would if people didn't already have an opinion about your opinions.
 
Cheers
IBIJ

 
My reply: Unless you believe, {IBIJ}, that you now also possess, the power of 'omniscience'..{all-knowing}; Which up til now, has been the sole perogative of the Divine; There is No way that you would know, as to how many people read Any post; Whether it has zero responses, or let's say, 2-to-4 responses!?
 
Interesting, that you would call that 'wsj' {Wall St. Journal} article, a 'diatribe'!?; Given that it was a rather objectively written piece; As in, giving a historical background to what it pertained to; And with "No axes' {or even mention} to grind''.. that dealt with the {distinct} minority of Christians {whether they be 'born-again' or not}, who make a point to worship on Saturday.
 
As for a 'copy & paste' being written 'by no one'; I think this could be merely another sign, {IBIJ}, that medically speaking, in some form, you're {ahem} 'Losin' It'!

Hi MUUUU
 
LOL...
 
I guess I take the statistic of zero responses to mean that no one is reading. Okay okay, that's presumption.
 
Zero responses does however appear to indicate that no one cares to respond.
 
Cheers
IBIJ

well you see the problem is, MU,
 
when you cut and paste and have no comment of your own, there is nobody that will respond because who do they repsond to, the author of the article? certainly not you, your views and opinions are deliberately left out.
 
what do you think, we are supposed to figure out what you think is relevent and post back to that?
I wouldn't waste my time, because a) I could be guessing wrong and b) since it requires you to actually TYPE something of your own, I doubt I'd ever get a repsponse back.

I knew this would happen. They/he is talking to himself.

Hi Rap
 
Only to the extent that we are both humans.
 
Cheers
IBIJ

No ! A human would know and realize when to stop and leave your little pamphlet for me to read and GET THE HELL OF MY PORCH !!!!
 

Hi Rap
 
Strange, I thought this was my pourch.
 
Who's porch is it anyway?
 
Perhaps you should leave my porch, no?
 
Cheers
IBIJ

I guess so. A mindless programmed robot can not understand anything except the 'trigger' words and phrases. Then it reacts with standard replies that have been worked out be smarter people and learned to simple minded followers many years ago.
 
Human?? Not a chance.

 
'Memory's, unsolicited observation: There's a moral here, somewhere!?
Anotherwords, two persons, {I have to assume}, neither of whom I particularly get along with; And vice-versa; Do not appear to like each other.-

Hi MUUUU
 
I have no trouble with whatever Rap wants to send my way... now if he were to make statements that you could tell he believed for which he was unwilling to backup with whatever evidance he migh prefer, then I would certainly be at odds with him.
 
Cheers
IBIJ

I stated exactly what I believe. It is not necessary to prove anything to anyone. You, on the other hand can't seem to stop with the redundant statements. You are the one that is not truly secure in your beliefs. Are you trying to impress us or yourself? I think it is just you that needs validation.
 
If the answer to a math problem is the number 4, how many normally accepted combination of math function are there to achieve this result? Please allow me to start you off in the event you won't understand or twist the question.
 
3+1=4.
 
Carry on if you will. The result will always be 4. Your posts are no different. Millions of ways to say EXACTLY the same thing. This is what I resent. Your long lame attempts to convince us that you are a righteous person. You, and others, are not proving anything. All you do is take up space.
 
 
 
 
As for zen and mamthing well......... Try this.........
 
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/marks.htm
 

True as you are, 4 is obtained by adding 1 + 3.
 
However, wouldn't it be rather short seighted of me to think this was the only way to reach the number 4?
 
Further, wouldn't it be rather naive of you to be upset at me for showing you that 2 + 2 also equals 4 not to mention other methods of arriving at such a number as
 
multiplication
subtraction
division
 
And don't even get me started on fractions.
 
The same holds true with teaching God's Word. Just because you find that there is one way to the answer doesn't mean you shouldn't teach the others as well.
 
Happy Sabbath
IBIJ