Peculiar Life of Sundays - Hardcover

A revealing work of cultural history.--Bryce Christensen"Booklist" (11/15/2008)

A lively, absorbing history of Sunday observance in the Christian West.--Susan Schwartz"Montreal Gazette" (02/02/2009)

Sunday, precisely because it was set apart for something other than work, became the stage for the complex moral and cultural debates that Miller's book describes.--Samuel Graber"Christianity and Literature" (06/01/2010)

Miller shows us the range of different approaches of literary minds to Sundays, from the beginning of Christianity to the present day, and his book clearly shows that Sundays have taken on a peculiar life of their own.--Arthur C. Sippo"New Oxford Review" (10/01/2010)

[A] lively history of a day that has exercised a peculiar hold on countless human beings for the past 2,000 years.--Jay Tolson"Wall Street Journal" (11/22/2008)

Miller is a nimble and original cultural historian.--Jeremy Lewis"Literary Review" (02/01/2009)

[A] polished and, at times, wistful meditation on the transformation of Sunday from late antiquity to the present.--Fiona Capp"The Age" (01/31/2009)

This engaging book provides a sweeping overview of Sunday observance in the Christian West from antiquity to the present.--G. T. Buggeln"Choice" (05/01/2009)

This wide-ranging study of the most singular day of the week--as it has played out over the centuries from antiquity to the present--will delight and inform readers. I found it beguiling in every way. Miller writes beautifully, drawing on a wealth of material, shaping his ideas and arguments with nothing short of amazing grace.--Jay Parini, Middlebury College

A fascinating cultural history of Sunday that draws on some of our best-known writers and public figures. Fluently written, vastly enjoyable, both instructive and diverting.--David Mikics, University of Houston

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.