The Peculiar Life of Sundays by Stephen Miller

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Synopsis

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 Westernculture.

Denise J. Stankovics - Library Journal

In this scholarly study, Miller (Conversation: A History of a Declining Art) examines the ways in which Sunday has been observed over the centuries in Western culture as well as the Sunday habits of selected British and American writers. Noting that his subject is of interest for historic and sociopolitical reasons, Miller begins with early Christian Sunday customs. Throughout, the book focuses on the meaning of Sunday among various groups, especially Sabbatarians and evangelicals as well as nonpracticing Christians. By no means all-inclusive, the work is selective in its examination of such groups as the English Puritans though, surprisingly, not during the time of Cromwell and the Protectorate. The title comes from a letter by Wallace Stevens, one of the writers considered here along with other notables including George Herbert, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, John Ruskin, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Robert Lowell. The final chapter covers religious experience in contemporary America and ends with the secularization of Sunday in this country. Of interest to academic libraries.

Biography

Stephen Miller is the author of the bestselling book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art.