For centuries in Christian Europe, Sunday was ideally a day of rest and worship, though in practice it also included plenty of play. Today, there is no single ideal, but the day still includes rest and worship, and even more entertainment and shopping, especially in the United States. SUNDAY traces the significance of Sunday from ancient times to the American present.
Historian Craig Harline tells the story of Sunday in a blend of facts and entertaining anecdotes. For early Christians, the first day of the week was a time to celebrate the liturgy and observe the Resurrection. Over time, Sunday took on new meanings and rituals. Harline illuminates these changes in enlightening profiles of Sunday in Medieval Catholic England, the largely Protestant Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, and nineteenth-century France--home of the most envied and sometimes despised Sunday of the modern world. He continues with moving portraits of soldiers and civilians observing Sunday during World War I, the quiet Sunday of England in the 1930s, and concludes with an American Sunday in the 1950s--the era marking the end of widespread Sunday "blue laws" and thus yet another change in the character of Sunday.
At once a comprehensive history and an amusing investigation into the intersection of the religious and the secular, SUNDAY will appeal to readers of Thomas Cahill, Karen Armstrong, Bruce Feiler, and other bestselling authors in the rapidly growing field of popular religious history.