The Sabbath Mind: What We Lost When We Murdered Sunday

Temporal resistance against the totalitarian claims.

The last Sunday of unbroken quiet in America died sometime between 1975 and 1985, though nobody thought to hold a funeral. Its death was not sudden but incremental, each small violation of the day’s sanctity seeming reasonable at the time. First went the blue laws, those Puritan holdovers that kept commerce at bay.

Then came the Sunday openings, tentati…