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The Peculiar Life Of Sundays
Stephen Miller
Harvard University Press
December 2008
On Sale: December 15, 2008
320 pages ISBN: 0674031687 EAN: 9780674031685 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History | Non-Fiction Religion
Sunday observance in the Christian West was an important
religious issue from late Antiquity until at least the early
twentieth century. In England the subject was debated in
Parliament for six centuries. During the reign of Charles I
disagreements about Sunday observance were a factor in the
Puritan flight from England. In America the Sunday question
loomed large in the nation’s newspapers. In the nineteenth
century, it was the lengthiest of our national
debates—outlasting those of temperance and slavery. In a
more secular age, many writers have been haunted by the
afterlife of Sunday. Wallace Stevens speaks of the “peculiar
life of Sundays.” For Kris Kristofferson “there’s something
in a Sunday, / Makes a body feel alone.” From
Augustine to Caesarius, through the Reformation and the
Puritan flight from England, down through the ages to
contemporary debates about Sunday worship, Stephen Miller
explores the fascinating history of the Sabbath. He pays
particular attention to the Sunday lives of a number of
prominent British and American writers—and what they have
had to say about Sunday. Miller examines such observant
Christians as George Herbert, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke,
Hannah More, and Jonathan Edwards. He also looks at the
Sunday lives of non-practicing Christians, including Oliver
Goldsmith, Joshua Reynolds, John Ruskin, and Robert Lowell,
as well as a group of lapsed Christians, among them Edmund
Gosse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Wallace
Stevens. Finally, he examines Walt Whitman’s complex
relationship to Christianity. The result is a compelling
study of the changing role of religion in Western culture.
(20081122)
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