For Latter-day Saints, the Sabbath occupies a vital link to lived religious ritual and tradition. It is a day of community association and communal education, a day of sacrality through sacramental participation, and often a dedicated time for family gathering. The Sabbath day has been at the center of recent Latter-day Saint reforms and institutional adjustments geared toward improving Sabbath observance. As the explicit intent of this chapter (and the volume of which it is a part) is to aid interested readers in expanding appreciation for Sabbath observance, the approach here will attempt to provide a wide set of evidence for the holy day’s place among other religious traditions. The hope in this particular chapter is that readers will find this approach to the Sabbath useful in developing a deeper understanding of why the biblical command remains relevant and essential for lived religious experience today. Additionally, by expanding the examples and insights to include other religious traditions, a more creative approach to Sabbath observance may be identified that allows readers to situate their Sabbath-day observance to their specific needs and experiences.

Such an effort to identify and bring into conversation different views of “Sabbath” among religious traditions faces a few challenges. First, there is the problem of scope; there are essentially two world religions (with billions of members and numerous denominational branches within them) that maintain Sabbath observance as part of their lived devotional life today—namely, Christianity and Judaism.[1] With such a large population and so many denominations, there will naturally be a myriad of differing opinions about Sabbath purpose and practices. Second, but not untethered from the first concern, is the question of whether it is a legitimate scholarly endeavor to draw parallels between these two diverse traditions of Christianity and Judaism that the communities themselves might not naturally draw. In approaching the study of a religious tradition that is not our own, it is wise practice to allow the practitioners of that religion to speak for themselves whenever possible. To accommodate this desire to hear the voices of religious adherents throughout this chapter, scriptural and community sources are used to provide evidence for the claims made herein. It is important to keep in mind that even when a canonized text is used to explain a particular concept or idea, these texts are never to be fully understood outside of the hermeneutical tradition and individual or collective ways of reading the text.

A third point of caution is that speaking of too many traditions too broadly usually misrepresents some aspect of a religious community and their practice. In order to limit this kind of overgeneralization I will, where possible, attempt to clarify to which denomination a text or interpretive voice belongs.

To illustrate the blessings of understanding in more rich and inspiring ways the place of the Sabbath, this chapter will proceed in the following way. First, I will analyze why this effort by religious communities to reengage believers with the Sabbath, including efforts by leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has necessarily involved thinking about the secular. I will use this information to lay out what is truly at stake in this Sabbath conversation. Next, the discussion will move to ways that Jews and Christians think about sacred time, including the Sabbath. Finally, we will look at potential applications for Latter-day Saints in their effort to keep holy this sacred day.

Being in the World with Religious Identities

The modern world poses significant challenges to those who hold faith and ritual as central elements of their identity and whose lived experience leads them to frame their worldview through a particular religious vantage point. The modern worldview, shaped through a post-Enlightenment lens, pushes away from the mysterious and numinous toward the rational, reproducible safety of a secular stance. Because of this, capturing deeply mysterious, spirit-infused moments of revelation and inspiration can, for many of us, seem near impossible at times. The difficulty of obtaining revelatory moments forces seekers into one of at least two possible stances: either there is no hope of receiving revelatory insight, or such revelation is entirely dependent upon external forces. The pursuit of divine inspiration, with its incumbent motivational impetus and requisite demand of action, is often described as too distant or too difficult to access in the harried minutes of the everyday. One might suppose, given this frame, that the modern world is, above all else, antithetical to spirituality. However, this resigned perspective reflects too easily the subtractive thesis of secularization that has been challenged in recent years. In his collected meditations, Latter-day Saint author Samuel Brown described the modern world in this way:

One area where I sense a substantial and growing blindness is in how we in this current age—with its glistening technology and accompanying ecological crisis, of individual self-fashioning and ruptured communities, of public secularism and private spiritual distress—tend to think about God and life in God. Entire categories of belief and life have been classified as outside the scope of polite society.[2]

Brown drew much of his thinking about the modern world from the writing of Charles Taylor, a Christian philosopher whose work on the secular has become standard reading for those studying the roles of belief and faith in today’s world. Taylor described this gradual removal of the theocentric involvement in the world as the result of the rise of “alternative construals of fulness.”[3] According to some perspectives, God, as an explanatory force in the natural world, has been supplanted with more naturalistic interpretations of phenomena, the consequences of which are manifest in many forms. The modern retraction from God’s will as explanation for earthquakes, floods, and illness has put new interpretive models in play. However, as Taylor made clear, this was not the subtractive removal of God, but rather the emergence of new alternatives to give reason and purpose to observable occurrences. Given this “disenchantment” of the world since the European Enlightenment period, many religious adherents feel under attack because their willingness to allow God to continually serve as explanation for some phenomena runs afoul at times of the more dominant secular explanatory models. According to one hardline set of atheistic writers known collectively as the “Four Horsemen,” faithful explanations of God’s work without empirical evidence have become the peddled wares of the irrational, the uneducated, or the duped.[4]

This direct dismissal of religion’s validity has been challenged by another atheist, Tim Crane, who argued that the Four Horsemen missed a critical piece of the religious puzzle today:

Contemporary atheist accounts tend to present religion as a kind of primitive cosmology—a primitive or proto-scientific theory of the universe as a whole—or as simply a moral code, or as some combination of these two things. While I think there are both cosmological and moral elements in religious belief, I reject the reduction in religious belief, I reject the reduction of religious belief to either of them, or even to their combination. Religious belief is not simply a cosmology or simply a morality, and it is not simply a cosmology-plus-morality.[5]

For Crane, what is missing from the New Atheists’[6] stance toward religion is an appreciative capacity to see belief as a purposeful effort toward discovering the “meaning of life.”[7] The episteme of belief requires a willingness toward suspension of disbelief when there is no evidentiary certitude. Therefore, within the modern world, we see two epistemological frames. Where New Atheism has decried anything other than scientific explanation, religious people continue to allow for divine presence here and now to provide a sense of purpose.[8] The will to believe remains in the world and religious communities. In fact, it is poignant that atheists often push religious believers to abandon core beliefs because when atheists do so, they sometimes actually shore up believers’ desire to enliven their religious activity.

Latter-day Saints have faced these issues head-on in past decades and continue to do so today. In 1934, Latter-day Saint writer Elsie Talmage Brandley laid bare the challenge that religious believers face by operating within a scaffolding of knowledge that is both religious and secular. In a critical speech to youth leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Brandley reiterated the necessity of questions as pathways to answers and discovery. With clear recognition of the apparent challenge of science to religion, Brandley suggested that it was the knowledge of the “fundamental truths of the gospel” that “leave one free to go far and wide, anchored by that knowledge, in search of all else that earth and sea and skies have to teach.”[9]

The tensions between our deeply held religious beliefs and the epistemology that shapes how we act in the world were not new in 1934, and they remain ever present in modern society. In the foreword to Steven Peck’s Evolving Faith, scholar George Handley suggests that “seeking to understand life, the universe, and everything . . . is an infinite, impossible, and yet indispensable human task that seems to mimic the divine mind.”[10] The complexity of this task forces us to negotiate the sometimes all-too-tangible tension between the world we hope for and the one we actually live in.

Part of the frustration for those who value and employ the divine as a causational element of life is the seeming lack of spiritual elements in the lives of friends, neighbors, and colleagues. More frustrating still to some religious believers is the fact that their neighbors seem so unaware of this gaping hole in their personal lives. James K. A. Smith described this difficulty in encountering people who disavow religious affiliation:

You’re a pastor or a church planter who has moved to Brooklyn or Berkeley or Boulder. Maybe you received a call to transplant yourself from Georgia or Grand Rapids or some other “religious” region of the country, sensing a burden to proclaim the gospel in one of the many so-called “godless” urban regions of North America. You’ve left your Jerusalem on a mission to Babylon. You came with what you thought were all the answers to the unanswered questions these “secular” people had. But it didn’t take long for you to realize that the questions weren’t just unanswered; they were unasked. And they weren’t questions. That is, your “secular” neighbors aren’t looking for “answers”—for some bit of information that is missing from their mental maps. You’ve realized that instead of nagging questions about God or the afterlife, your neighbors are oriented by all sorts of longings and “projects” and quests for significance. There doesn’t seem to be anything “missing” from their lives—so you can’t just come proclaiming the good news of a Jesus who fills their “God-shaped hole.” They don’t have any sense that the “secular” lives they’ve constructed are missing a second floor. In many ways, they have constructed webs of meaning that provide almost all the significance they need in their lives (though a lot hinges on that “almost”).[11]

For Brown, Taylor, and Smith, the challenge that confronts modern religious individuals is one of displacement, not replacement. Taylor argues that disenchantment in society eroded human beings’ dependency on religion as an explanatory source, and thus it became one among many options for explaining the world around us. The place of religion in society has shifted, but it most definitely has not been replaced by some other institution. In the modern world, as religion has become identified as a distinctive element of society, in parallel with an emergent secular element, religious identity is at the core of many human understandings of the self.[12] The frame has always been malleable, but recently religion has become one among many variables that people use to determine self-understanding.[13] Within the changed context of the modern period and a broader set of categories for the formation of self-conception, religious people often negotiate a competitive relationship with secular versions of identity. Many people are entirely comfortable being in the world without dependence upon the divine to explain or to act within modern society. This reality, while foreign to many religious people, forces those who preserve room for God to hold those views publicly, though they often do so timidly.

Connected to this notion of a disenchanted world—that is, the long-term societal decentralization of religious affiliation from collective and individual identity construction—the modern religious person faces challenges to efforts to find a place and context for religious belonging. In our effort to build the familiar frames of reference that provide a sense of unity with the surrounding environment, we as religious individuals often face a discomforting realization: we do not belong here. Elder Marvin J. Ashton once noted, “When we have a yearning and don’t know what it is for, perhaps it’s our soul longing for its heartland, longing to be no longer alienated from the Lord and the pursuit of something higher, better, and more fulfilling than anything this earth has to offer.”[14] As remarkable as this sentiment for a spiritual heartland is, there are competing factors at play in our search for belonging. James K. A. Smith suggested the following difficulties:

Ours is a pilgrimage without a destination—which is to say, it’s not a pilgrimage at all but rather a pilgrimage deferred, not because we stay home but because we revel in the roaming, or at least try to talk ourselves into that. Our ancestors sang psalms of ascent as they marched to Zion or made the arduous hajj to Mecca or wended their way to Canterbury. We’ve inherited their pilgrim penchant, but it’s morphed into unsettledness, a baseline antsy feeling that leaves us never feeling at home (which brings to mind the Freudian notion of the “uncanny,” the Unheimlich, not-at-home-ness). We’re always on the move, restless, vaguely chasing something rather than oriented to a destination.[15]

Roth suggested that in our search for the divine, we act on the Sabbath in a way to see ourselves “among the work of his hands”—a work that pushed God to rest after the sixth creative period.[16] So intense is daily human existence that God insisted upon rest, realignment, and renewal as central elements of our individual and collective refinement through Sabbath observance. God modeled this for us on the seventh day—a day to be reminded of eternity rather than that which is most proximate. Therefore, in our efforts as religious beings and as religious communities to find God, we often strive to emulate God’s act of rest.

The Institution of the Sabbath and Sacred Time

Observance of a Sabbath day is a practice limited to Judaism and Christianity. Thus, other authors in this volume have drawn upon a long-held set of practices and teachings that are housed within the Torah, Talmud, New Testament, and elsewhere to explain the history of the Sabbath day. This territory is well trodden and will not be dealt with extensively here; instead it will be used to shape the discussion about some of the contemporary Sabbath-day concerns felt by practitioners within these two religious traditions. While only Judaism and Christianity have a concrete Sabbath set aside, many other religious practitioners hold similar concerns about the loss of sacred ritual and time. Islam, as we will examine later, is instructive for thinking about the ways that sacred time is maintained in a secular age where people of opposing faiths engage productively or destructively with one another. After a review of how other religious practitioners view the Sabbath and also aspects of sacred or holy time, some reflection from a Latter-day Saint vantage point suggests possible applications of these varying ideas.

The Sabbath, as an institution, was biblically instated and thereby fits within Jewish and Christian liturgical and ritual cycles. The Sabbath historically occupied a central organizing function for much of religious life within these two traditions, and the emergence of a distinctive Christian community separate from its Jewish roots led to the gradual move away from the close connection of Jewish Shabbat practices among Christians.

Readers will remember how Jewish scripture has repeatedly recalled and reminded Jews from all time periods about their obligation to observe the Sabbath properly and the attached blessings attained through doing so. The author(s) of the Sefer Ha-Zohar (Book of Radiance), a thirteenth-century Jewish mystical text closely associated with the thought of Moses de Leon of Guadalajara, argued in tractate 1:14a that there are two commandments associated with the Sabbath day: first, to “observe the Sabbath,” and second, to accomplish the work of “endowing that day with holiness.”[17] There are surely countless interpretations of what these two aspects of practice entail, but the act of “observing” the Sabbath seems to fall within the Decalogue’s encouragement to “not do any work.” Historically, it was the rabbis who sought to invest the Sabbath with special meaning through the articulation of 39 categories of “work” (melachot).[18] Even then, God and the rabbis knew that work is intrusive; there is always more of it, and there will always be our sense of needing to do something better. Thus the first commandment is to remember the Sabbath by setting aside a day without work. The secondary aspect, that of “remembering the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:9–10), must bear more in mind than mere temporary reduction of labor. The dual commandment is one that many Christian and Jewish community leaders are now hoping to recover as a means to reenliven their sense of the Sabbath.

When religious people attempt to reform, recall, or adjust lived religious practice, the experience of other religious practitioners within and outside their own religions can be very helpful because these experiences can help practitioners to see new ways of thinking or even to recapture ideas that may have been a part of their tradition in the past but have slipped away. Just as Jewish observance of the Sabbath throughout history has served as an example of close adherence to the command to keep the day holy for Christians, it might be time for both communities to now look to each other for guidance in the promotion of a more dedicated religious practice.[19]

The “Erosion” of Sabbath Observance

Within Judaism and Christianity, the footprint of Sabbath observance and sacredness continues to bear influence on the modern world. However, the gradual move away from religious institutions generally as central organizing bodies in the public sphere has led to a reduced emphasis on sacrality of time and space with regard to Sabbath observance. Increasingly, the Sabbath has become a remainder of ancient practices that people might dip into if or when they desired to connect with their religious community— and individual preference determines how and to what degree that observance might be manifested. In North America and Europe, the Sabbath as a day of rest for Christians has faced incursions from shopping centers and other sites of consumerism that choose to remain open on the Sabbath. Where once these were closed shops and silent malls, today there is competition for our attention on the Sabbath. While this may be a more recent development within Christianity, these challenges have been present for Jews for a much longer period, as the majority Christians have maintained Friday evening and Saturday as common days for work and other activities. In this way, it is important to recognize the community differences between these two religious groups, as well as the denominational experiences that allow for a much more nuanced context. This sense of loss of holiness on the day of rest for both traditions is not a new sentiment, but its rapid expansion is cause for concern and deep reflection on what is lost when the Sabbath (and the emphasis on sacred time more generally) exits the world. The disappearance of traditional Sabbath practices are lamented in many circles, including the popular country line “Sunday was a day of rest / Now, it’s one more day for progress / And we can’t slow down / ‘Cause more is less / It’s all an endless process.”[20] Gradual marginalization of observance through practice is eroding more than just the sense of being grounded in the tradition. Whole institutional strongholds are shaken if not continually renewed and reinvented by religious people.

The collected chapters of this volume speak to the enormity of the worldwide project to better understand the Sabbath’s history, sacrality, and ritual importance for Latter-day Saints. Throughout history, not just a little ink found its way onto page after page where writers articulated the significance of the Sabbath for observant Jews and Christians. For millions of people, the Sabbath continues to mark the traditional day of rest and recommitment to God. However, as The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions suggested in the late 1990s, “the erosion of ‘sabbath observance’ is now extensive.”[21] With such hopelessness about the Sabbath and its future, it comes as little surprise that the erosion of these key institutions in modern society seems to prelude the loss of more than just a set of rituals. Anne McCue’s folk-rock song “Stupid” summarized this sense of potential loss well in its opening stanza, “Lennon said there are no institutions / There’s nothing to believe anymore.”[22] McCue’s lyrics have several layers of wisdom. The sense that loss of institutions and frameworks preludes loss of belief motivates within many people the desire to reinstitute Sabbath practice in their own lives and in the world. Doing so, they seem to believe, will push belief in God and His covenant back into the world.

The challenge for the modern world is to reengage with millennia of deeply religious acts that refocus the sacred at the heart of society. President Russell M. Nelson stated, “God gave us this special day, not for amusement or daily labor but for a rest from duty, with physical and spiritual relief.”[23] In recent years, both Jews and Christians (including Latter-day Saints) have found maintaining the Sabbath to be difficult for countless reasons, not the least of which is a compelling cultural shift away from religious adherence among growing numbers of the world’s population. The distractions that pull people away from Sabbath worship are plentiful, and while as a society, we seem to have sought to maintain the injunction to “not do any work,” the essential effort to maintain holiness seems to have slipped into a negotiation with our surrounding cultural environment.

It will be useful here to talk about the context of institutions, and of the Sabbath as an institution. Institutions frame human social engagements and are built upon the existence of definable and repeatable rituals or actions that fill those spaces with meaning. In recent years, talk of the Sabbath as an institution has recirculated among religious communities as they try to capture both the physicality (ritual) of the weekly event and the meaning of the rituals and practices associated with it.[24] Jewish historian Cecil Roth has reflected on the common root of Judaism that Christianity splintered away from and identified the unique concerns that both traditions have emphasized in their own way. Roth makes clear that even with significant differences in the way Sabbath was observed, Christians and Jews shared a central concern for human capacity to improve and realize a world made holy through their efforts to mend the broken (or fallen) world (tikkun olam):

Men need a vision which gives meaning to moral striving. This can take the form of one or two ideals in which present inequalities are redressed, the one that of a perfected social order, the other that of a perfected individual life-cycle. Both these ideals took shape in the Hebraic tradition, the former receiving more stress in Judaism, the latter in Christianity. Although obviously compatible with one another they have appealed separately to different persons and different ages, and both have stimulated reflection, the one on the practical problem of social justice, the other on the religious problem of immortality. If one adds the institution of the Sabbath, which is nothing other than the voluntary limitation of the hours of labour which raises man above the beasts and asserts man’s moral dignity as a human being, we have a trio of Hebraic ideals directly derived from the Old Testament which yet have a role to play in our civilisation.[25]

The Sabbath, which Roth apparently views as “nothing other than the voluntary limitation . . . of labour,” is at the same time elevated as the mechanism for “asserting moral dignity.” If the choice to restrict human work bears the power to elevate respect for human capacity to do good in the world, then our stewardship of the physical world, whether in agriculture or husbandry, signifies a sincere effort to put the created world, human existence, and God into proper relationship.

For Christians and Jews, Isaiah paints a similar call for first ushering in the Sabbath “Queen” (Talmud 119a) in holiness, and second, having done so, “seek[ing] the favor of the Lord” (Isaiah 58:13–14, Tanakh). Such readings of this text locate the centrality of the Sabbath at the heart of each tradition, rather than as a negotiable aspect of ritual life. Exodus 20 provides clear evidence for acting differently on the Sabbath, as it is “the sabbath of the Lord thy God” and he “blessed” it and “hallowed it” (vv. 10–11). For Christians, the proper maintenance of the Sabbath ensures blessings, protections, and the extension of God’s grace. The Christian tradition draws heavily upon the Jewish understanding of the Sabbath as a moment of ritual observance coupled with distinctive forms of hospitality, reverence, and study of sacred texts. The New Testament writers’ frequency of mentioning the Jewish Sabbath as a setting for Jesus performing some noteworthy action, such as reading (see Luke 4:16), teaching (see Matthew 13), healing (see Luke 14:1–6), or even his resurrecting after the Sabbath (see Matthew 28:1 and parallels), locates the Sabbath as a central point of intersection between Jesus and the Jewish community in which he was a participant. Given this centrality, early Christians needed to work with the concept of Sabbath even as they sought to redefine the term and their practice for themselves in the early centuries after Christ.[26]

In the modern world, those who seek to understand the how and why of Sabbath observance are reinvesting in their sacred texts as means of ensuring the blessings that are promised through the holy day. The Talmud shapes a similar sentiment for observing the Sabbath and maintaining proper ritual as a means of receiving divine blessings. In the Talmud the story of Joseph the Sabbath lover is instructive for all of us. After a Gentile miraculously recovers his jewel from a fish who had swallowed it, the Talmud reminds readers that “he who lends to the Sabbath—the Sabbath pays him back.”[27] So important was the proper keeping of the Sabbath that Talmudic sages suggested that if the people could keep two full Sabbaths properly, the messiah would come. Israel would have been saved and not ruled over because having done so is the fulfillment of all mitzvot (commandments).[28] So while the Sabbath may be perceived as a prohibitive day where pleasures and self-willed enjoyment have no place, a deeper study of the ways in which the Sabbath can be celebrated should offer hope that the day becomes a day of rest that does more than while away time.

Latter-day Saints have a close connection to the concept of self-mastery as a method to exert control on the world around us. We believe that as we attain a higher moral relationship, we gain enlightenment and mastery of the physical world. Latter-day Saints have always emphasized a particular set of rituals that occur only in certain places or at certain times, not because they are inaccessible at other times, but because of Saints’ efforts to place such rituals in proper relationship with other events in our and to invite God’s power into the lives of those who partake of these ordinances (see Doctrine and Covenants 84; 20–22; 88: 66–68). Elsewhere in the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith was reminded of this need to seek moral purity; God told him to go to “the house of prayer and offer up thy sacraments upon my holy day; . . . inasmuch as ye do this, the fulness of the earth is yours” (Doctrine and Covenants 59:9, 16). Many who in the past have participated in Sunday School lessons about the Sabbath day have likely found themselves focused on the permissible and restricted activities involved in proper Sabbath observance. Perhaps the most common method for examining how to best live the Sabbath rituals and requirements is to turn to a list of dos and don’ts. Anyone who has undertaken such an effort must have concluded that this is also a surefire way to raise ire and discontent among religious adherents. One of the reasons people tend to get upset or uncomfortable in the prescriptive modes often employed when speaking of such “lists” is that teachers and preachers often attempt to encourage or enforce religious standards that might not have current application in the twenty-first century. Additionally, too often Christians juxtapose proper “spirit-filled” Sabbath observance against legalistic readings of the New Testament context between Jesus and his Jewish interlocutors. Doing so eliminates the space where Saints might learn from Jewish practices as sources of inspiration rather than degradation. Unfortunately for Christians, the default mode of reading scripture through a supersessionist lens causes Christian readers of the Bible to gloss over and misunderstand the purpose of Jewish Sabbath regulation. As a possible corrective, students of the Bible might venture on occasion into an informed reading of Jewish literature to look for aspects of deep respect for and observance of Sabbath. One might negatively look to Mishnaic debates about whether a tailor with a needle or a scrivener with her pen ought to leave the house on Friday afternoon and question the sanctity (or even relevancy) of the command as interpreted by the early rabbis.[29] But there is an alternative option: viewing such teachings as evidence of a strong desire to see a protection of the Sabbath through carefully constructed ritual practices, Christians and Latter-day Saints can be inspired to take stock of where their rituals are in need of shoring up to better sanctify the day with holiness. With proper respect for another religion’s sacred texts, we may thereby locate lessons that aid us in our effort to find truth and enlightenment about this central command to keep the Sabbath day holy.

Religious texts become sacred texts over time, and their transcendent value exponentially increases with longevity. Religious communities and their practitioners bring texts to life by fulfilling the rituals these texts inspire. Jewish efforts to “remember” and sanctify the Sabbath accomplish this every week even as they reinvent anew each week the forms of those rituals. Many modern readers of scripture too often look to sacred texts as a compendium of exact stipulations rather than as contextualized hypothetical examples to evoke the conversation about what a person should or should not do on the Sabbath. Perhaps with a more open set of expectations about what sacred texts could say to a modern world, and with a radically generous insistence on a hermeneutic of possibility, a new way of thinking on the subject can increase Sabbath “productivity” in the ways God seemed to intend. While the religious believer of any tradition has to deal with the reality that our sacred texts were written within a particular context with relation to specific people, the transcendence of the text across time can also inspire religious practitioners toward universal lessons and maxims.[30] Using as an example the I Ching (a ninth century BCE Chinese text that bore influence for Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism), Hellmut Wilhelm suggested that while the book has its roots in the Zhou period of Chinese history, its lessons cross millennia: “The situations are always raised above temporal manifestations into a realm where they bear an archetypal character; historical recollections are used to illustrate the archetype but never to tie it to a particular manifestation. Thus the system of the text appears timeless, or above time.”[31] Wilhelm’s sentiment about the transcendent nature of religious text should be a good reminder that we read these inspired texts not because they were written in our day, but because their concerns speak to the human condition, the longings of human hearts, and the religious experiences with the divine had by others who lived long before us. When we can see a common desire to encounter the divine through our sacred texts, much can be revealed that is both pertinent and expansive in scope.

In very different ways, Christians have emphasized the aspect of remembrance as central to the work we do on the Sabbath day. Christians have longed for Sabbath observance to signal both a present belief in the need to recall creation and also as a means of enacting the very elements of ritual that connect them to the divine sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It is not insignificant that for Latter-day Saints the Sabbath is the day we are enjoined to “remember” as a means of receiving sanctification and blessings at the sacramental table (Moroni 4–5). Our desire to remember the crowning achievements of God in the past (that is, the Creation, the Atonement, the Resurrection) has led Christians to locate ritual around a particular day. The result for Christians then is to protect the day from incursions of the mundane, everyday activities of life. Failure to do so would inevitably shake the roots of Christian religious life –so the stakes are quite high.

Saving Sabbath—Isn’t it about Time?

In its modern form, the Sabbath is characterized by rituals, space, and time. Each of these elements works variously across the Sabbath-observance traditions to highlight the sacrality of the period. The purpose of the Sabbath, both from its biblical origins and in its more recent Latter-day Saint emphasis, builds upon the need for a reflective engagement with sacred time. Sacred time, ensconced within creation, lends itself to a sense of imagination and renewal through the participants’ temporal withdrawal from the mundane or profane. For practitioners, the effort to order the Sabbath begins with the process of demarcating the day differently than other days. This can happen through the employment of space or time. The demarcation through ritual often signals a change in space or time even if only through symbolic change. And, even then, the physical sensibilities of a day dedicated away from the mundane draws us nearer to a clarity of understanding and purpose. Dan Bellm’s poem “Sabbath” excellently evokes this feeling of nearness and distance:

Then will I carry

you within me for as long

as I can: not a

consolation but

a promise, and not because

I must: not as you

carried me but to

be your keeper, a place where

you remain the one

bearing life: not as

a god or idol that I

have made too small, but

only blessing you

do I keep the blessing safe:

infant image of

the created one

I long to be, Sabbath-self

concealed in the guise

of ordinary

time, my life the covering

that protects the vow.[32]

It is this longing for connection that seems to resonate with those who strive to keep the Sabbath day holy. The Sabbath was designed to become an event, or a site where an interconnected web of separation, concealment, and reparation make one whole again after a week of toil.

When we look at other religions and their protection of sacred time, there are some instructive points that might be drawn upon to shore up a Latter-day Saint effort toward holiness on the Sabbath. While there are only two world religions (in many different denominational stripes) that observe the Sabbath by divine command, other religious traditions can help us in identifying other ways of demarcating efforts to become holy through sanctification of a period of time. Such an exploration in its fullest form is far too large an undertaking for this chapter, but Islam might serve as a good case study on the ways that time and sanctification work in tandem. Islam teaches that there are five “pillars,” or practices, that should become part of daily spiritual practice. These include shahada (declaration of faith), salat (prayer), zakat (alms), sawm (fasting), and hajj (pilgrimage). The most important moment when Muslims participate in prayer is al-Juma, which takes placeon Friday afternoon. Muslims look to the Qur’an and the sahih hadith (authentic sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) for instruction as to why the Friday (Yawm al-Jum’ah, “day of gathering”) afternoon prayers are considered vital to their well-being. While Islam does not maintain the Sabbath as practiced in the other Abrahamic traditions, there are historical references in central texts that do make an effort to identify a similarity across all three religions. According to Al-Bukhari’s hadith, Muslims should think of their fulfillment of Friday prayers (al-Juma) as the most complete (updated) version of Jewish and Christian observances: “This was their day (Friday) on which the celebration was made compulsory for them but they differed about it. So Allah gave us the guidance for it (Friday) and all the other people are behind us in this respect: the Jews’ (holy day) is tomorrow (Saturday) and the Christians’ is the day after tomorrow (Sunday).”[33] From this we see that even very early on in the history of Islam, there were leading figures who focused on and thought about the Sabbath as a specific form of ritual activity that was meant to be protected from mundane violations of the every day.

Time, regardless of duration, signals a requisite remembering of something outside of the profane world. It serves as a gathering point, bringing unity and strength to those who seek it. Collin Turner, a scholar of Islam, makes clear that Muslims do not maintain a day on which they withdraw from other daily activities in the way that Jews and Christians do, but the need to justify a complete (albeit temporary) abstention from work is clearly pointed out in the Qur’an.[34] God instructed Muhammad that “when the call to prayer is made on the day of assembly, hurry to the remembrance of God, and leave business aside. That is better for you, if (only) you knew. Then, when the prayer is finished, disperse on the earth and seek some favor from God. And remember God often, so that you may prosper. But when they see (the chance of) some (business) transaction or diversion, they rush off to it, and leave you standing. Say: ‘What is with God is better than any diversion or transaction. God is the best of providers’” (Qur’an 62: 9–11).[35] Muslims demarcate their sacred time by participating in the afternoon prayers, by abstaining from other mundane activities, and by gathering together in mosques in an effort to solidify the community’s commitment to and the individual’s participation in holy ritual. In this sense, there is a common Abrahamic concern among these three great religions to find locations and space for the preservation of a transcendent time.

In all of these traditions, prayer is deeply engrained into the ritualization of the Sabbath. The engagement with God via prayer signals to oneself a reprioritization of the divine act of worshipping with community as well as a remembrance of the divine creation. The parallels from this Qur’anic passage above map easily onto Jewish and Christian approaches to the Sabbath. In Islam, the act of recalling a rest period as a culmination of the creative period is based in hadith literature where Adam and Eve’s creation is seen as a pinnacle of Godly creation (the sixth day). Given the holiness of the act of prayer, Muslims are told to bathe (perform ablutions) in preparation for the communal prayer.[36] This kind of preparation for holy engagement is likewise seen in Judaism, where ritual handwashing is accompanied by prayer before the Sabbath meal.

This necessary aspect of reconnection through withdrawal is a familiar framework for many religious rituals. While we build ways of distinguishing purpose through architectural means, the architecture of human life is less easily parceled apart. The demarcation of time provides the participant with a framework that encourages suspension of other activities in an otherwise distractable world. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested that we should think of “time not as a degradation of eternity, but as the relationship to that which—of itself unassimilable, absolutely other—would not allow itself to be assimilated by experience; or to that which—of itself infinite—would not allow itself to be comprehended.”[37] The Sabbath alludes to the eternal without placing it only in the physical, earthly realm. It is the very pursuit of a relationship that remains only distantly viable that makes this demarcated time sacred. Levinas again insists that “time signifies . . . this always of the relationship, an aspiration and an awaiting.”[38] N. T. Wright, a Christian theologian, echoed a Jewish reading of the Psalms to remind Christians of this sense of anticipation: “God in his wisdom knows that we shall want and need to express the pain of being caught in the crack of time. . . . Our confidence in the future restorative justice of God may even give us confidence to do justice ourselves in the present.”[39] Craig Harline, a scholar of Reformation Europe, suggested that “with their temple destroyed and their people scattered across Babylon, exiled Jews developed sacred time (the Sabbath) to compensate for the loss of sacred space (the temple).”[40] The destruction of the temple forced Judaism into a new mode of religious observance, one that reemphasized the divine creation narrative, demarcated by time rather than human construction of sacred places. At the same time, the mandate to make new that which was shattered led Judaism into a reshaping of Sabbath adherence, one that demanded the most creative and sincere efforts by human beings to capture the sense of what it means to be holy. Just as the tangible sense of loss during the first century CE made this sense of awaiting much more present in the religious imagination of Jews who had just lost the temple in Jerusalem, Christian hopes mirror this desire for a world repaired by God. The Sabbath also works to remind us of our shared interest in that project.

The great rabbi, civil rights activist, and writer Abraham Joshua Heschel sought to capture this sense of space and time in pursuit of holiness. Heschel recognized that what defined the sacred nature of the Sabbath was not space, but time. Human work perpetuates the monument of accomplishment, of mastery, of domination over the physical world. Within Heschel’s mind, the Sabbath remained the one place where human architecture and manipulation could not supplant or replace holiness. Rather, what was properly needed was the construction of a “palace in time.”[41] Heschel noted that “to gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”[42]

Similarly, Wright showed that our current state is entirely dependent upon God’s work with us in time and space. “We are called to live,” Wright argued, “joyfully and painfully, in the story that is both his and ours. Our times are in his hands.”[43] The challenges are many, but a broad investigation of how various religious traditions are recapturing sacred time through ritual, cultural liturgy, and reappropriation of past thought highlights how the Sabbath can reoccupy its place of divinely commanded prominence for the modern world. The traditional modes with which people attempt to of dominate their physical space are wholly insufficient to align the intended use of Sabbath with modern contexts. The problem is simply that “labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art.”[44] Our understanding of what work entails and how it is done has changed—when work was largely manual effort and toil, we were closer to its immediacy.[45] In our work, we are largely distant from the actual product through technology and computers. It is for this reason that we have to reinstitute barriers of time that allow us to turn off the instruments of work that are so easily blurred with the instruments of entertainment and allow rest to be central to our existence rather than a peripheral element.

Rest has been at the core of Sabbath observance since the very beginning of Judaism and Christianity, even if our thinking about rest has changed over time. Even the early Christian church father Saint Augustine called upon God at the close of his Confessions to pull us forward toward a more perfected form of rest. Early on, he asked God for “rest.”[46] The reader of Confessions will recall the tumultuous self-realization process that Augustine experienced and emerged from at the end with this beautiful mediation on the Sabbath. Recalling the creative act, Augustine suggested that “the seventh day has no evening and no sunset, because you have sanctified it to abide eternally. As a result, the voice of your book would tell us that after your works of creation that were “very good” (even though you did them in a state of repose) you do not see in time, act in time, rest in time; but yet you create our seeing in time, and time itself, and rest in time.”[47] It is this hope for eternal rest that is best recalled to memory through a commitment to locating the purpose of such rest, both physically and spiritually, through renewal of Sabbath observances.

Appreciative Examples Within the Christian Tradition

So then, how do Christians obtain this rest and holiness to which we are called through scripture, through human longing for peace, and through our desire to seek communion with the divine? What do other Christians foster in terms of practice and ritual that binds them to the Sabbath and the pursuit of the divine will? For Latter-day Saints, the challenge is readily apparent, even as a way out may not be so clear. One of the clear paths forward, is the way of liturgical celebration and communal worship, but this is a path to which Latter-day Saints are less accustomed. It is true that Latter-day Saints do gather together, though worship services may feel overly fluid and lack the characteristic high liturgy of many other traditions. A much-sung hymn in the current Latter-day Saint hymnal speaks to an element of Christian worship that is noticeably absent from the typical sacrament meeting. The joyful anthem “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” calls the congregation to “Join the great throng / Psaltery, organ and song / Sounding in glad adoration!” Should a survey of those in the congregation be taken, the results might reveal a lack of awareness of the Psalter used so richly in other Christian traditions to guide worship and prayer. The Psalter can historically take various forms, but the Psalms were organized specifically for liturgical use—that is, use in hymns, prayers, and other such communal efforts. Although members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do not have this form of communal worship through the psalmic prayers, it may prove useful to consider the ways that they might evoke the kinds of practices that would aid in Sabbath efforts towards holiness.

One example that highlights religious innovation as a means of greater observance comes from the Catholic church. After the reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s, an effort began to speak again to the souls of congregants through a revitalization and application of the liturgy to local demographics. The liturgy began to include the language of the community in large degree rather than strictly using Latin. By enlivening the language of the service through familiarity, the idea of community worship became a way to encourage Sabbath participation in greater numbers. The Mundelein Psalter’s “Introduction,” which focuses on communal religious practice from the Catholic Church and Vatican II, is another inspirational example of the place of prayer in human life and might therefore aid us in our pursuit of pathways to greater holiness.[48] This text was designed to bring into clearer relief the importance of the Psalms as the central feature of the prayer within the storied history of the Church. The purpose of such a text “with its roots sunk deep in the daily prayer of Judaism, the diurnal, public recitation of the Psalms has been the daily companion of Christians through the history of the Catholic church. The structuring of the liturgical year, of the week, and of the day give a profound meaning and stability to the church’s desire to keep the mysteries of faith ever before us.”[49] Seeing these examples, one might seek ways of invoking a similar spirit through a common reading of scripture. Perhaps elements of this effort may emerge locally, at the initiative of individuals and families that invite others to join for a conversation focused on a passage of scripture. The possibilities are, at least locally, endless given a desire to find avenues that build individuals and communities through worship. This pursuit of the divine mysteries is often aligned with unique qualities of a well-reverenced Sabbath, and the expansion of the human soul leads to a more engaged spirituality.

One of the great hallmarks of the Eastern Christian tradition is its deep mystery and reverence for prayer. The purpose of prayer is to transform the relationship of self-will to divine will. As the Russian religious philosopher Berdyaev so keenly noted, “In the relation between man and God an infinite spiritual experience is possible.”[50] For many in the Christian world, the biblical injunction to maintain prayer as a constant in one’s life leads to a high dependence on and joyful celebration in Sabbath worship services and unlocks the mystery of the Sabbath. The Psalms centrality in Psalters and books of hours in Catholicism is one such manifestation to keep prayer active in the life of the believer. The eastern tradition has a similar focus that goes beyond the desire to maintain a prayer-filled service.

The words of 1 Thessalonians 5:17 call Christians to this kind of commitment to prayer in the words “pray without ceasing.” The possibility of praying in all contexts internally opens one up to a kind of meditative engagement with the divine will in the Orthodox tradition, made possible through the unique encounter with Jesus. For the Latter-day Saint community, the dictate to “pray always to the Father” (3 Nephi 18:19) often speaks to a symbolic rather than physical manifestation of persistent prayer. In the Orthodox tradition, however, the hesychasm tradition of interior prayer offers an alternative practice that seeks to accomplish this idea in a more tangible way. Hesychasm in the Eastern Rite is a practice of perpetuating prayer throughout the day by means of a discipline that allows one to internalize the prayer in the way that breathing is autonomously perpetuated.[51] Though the history of the hesychast tradition has its own complex and controversial history, it has remained an Eastern Orthodox practice that is both valid and encouraged.[52] The Jesus Prayer, or “Prayer of the Heart,” seeks to accomplish the “infinite spiritual experience” Berdyaev mentions above.[53] Practices such as these likely will not be adopted into Latter-day Saint communal life in any concrete form, but their existence in other traditions might cause us to pause and see what we could draw upon to help strengthen our own worship practices and rituals as instruments for greater holiness. There may well be reasons that Latter-day Saints do not participate in traditional Christian practices that involve liturgy, prayer life, and communal celebrations; however a greater awareness of the ways in which other people of faith have sought to find God in the modern world can help build a greater respect for others’ deep love of the Sabbath and the value of tradition as a form of communal continuity.

Again from the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition, we might learn from the twentieth-century martyr Father Alexander Men how to increase our capacity for “rest” in the modern world.[54] In the 1970s and 1980s, Father Men often held clandestine meetings, or besedy, with Christians in the Soviet Union and taught them how to live out their religious life with conviction even in antagonistic settings. In one such besedy, he taught, “We each have our own external and internal reasons for tiredness that has built up within us. We hope that our situation will somehow radically change when vacation comes. This hope is in vain, however, because we have already been on vacation numerous times and continued to hobble along in the same way. . . . This means that tension weighs upon us a like a rock.” His prescribed remedy to this hopeless pursuit of rest depended upon a “lever” that included “six to ten minutes per day for prayers from the prayer book, which we read regardless of our mood,” and “prayerful fellowship with God” in addition to scripture reading and the Eucharist.[55] Such systematic approaches suggested by Father Men emerge out of the very oft-prayed prayer of Saint Ephraim the Syrian (306–373 CE), who pleaded for such divine intervention in transforming his own self:

Lord and Master of my life, Take from me the spirit of laziness, despair, lust of power and idle conversation.

Rather give me the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Your servant. Indeed,

O Lord, King, allow me to see my own sins and to not judge my brother, for blessed are you from ages to ages.[56]

Father Men believed that the humble stance of despondency shown in the prayer could lead one to a remembrance of the salvation afforded through Jesus. The human being, according to Father Men and Saint Ephraim, seems prone toward idleness or laziness, both qualities that miss the aspirations of Christian discipline. The turn to prayer as a system of discipline, connected to intentional study of scripture and the Lord’s supper, bears the potential to alter the human relationship to the divine and to the world. As the Communion Antiphon for Ash Wednesday suggests, “He who ponders the law of the Lord day and night will yield fruit in due season.”[57] Like the hesychasts who pray the Jesus Prayer and the priests who pray the daily offices of the church have shown, intentional building of rituals and disciplines into daily life provides opportunities for greater holiness and further personal growth. Such practices as increased emphasis on prayer and scripture study have been increasingly encouraged as part of Sabbath worship for Latter-day Saints in recent years, though the paucity of liturgical instruments makes it far less clear on how to achieve such aims. The Mundelein Psalter reminds us that “it is the essence of the Church to be visible yet endowed with invisible resources, eager to act yet intent on contemplation, present in this world yet not at home in it.”[58] As parishioners, members, and believers, perhaps such a stance is one that we all might hope to find through a greater emphasis on devotional discipline. The lessons that might be drawn from other religious faiths can only serve to benefit earnest seekers of truth and to broaden their capacity toward creative reengagement through ritual and study. Latter-day Saint tradition will need to be creative in how it builds stronger connections to Sabbath ideals of rest and holiness, but these examples can serve as a starting point to open up the conversation in directions that may lead to that end goal. Indeed, the active development of religious literacy about people and traditions often provides greater affinity for and common values found between people, forming a deep well of inspiration that bolsters the lives of people of faith.

Latter-day Saints should take comfort in knowing that other traditions look to capture this sense of rest through all kinds of religious festivals, yet it is really the act of stepping out of the mundane temporarily that illuminates the hidden spaces of eternity. For thousands of years the Sabbath as an institution has remained a core aspect of religious life, and people have constantly fought to keep it holy, often failing, but sometimes capturing glimpses of true rest. While doing so, they reengage the divine through efforts to approximate, envision, and embody holiness. Holiness has never been easy, but it is possible, at least in a limited, human form through the rituals of Sabbath observance. We may need to remake them and reimagine them for our modern world again and again, but this is not new. We need not fear the erosion of the Sabbath. The Sabbath day can continue to be a source of strength if we intentionally learn to remember it, postpone work, and seek holiness in everyday life.

Notes

[1] It is important to register here the fact that for many Jews today, religion is but one nonessential part of a complicated set of contributing elements to Jewish identity, which includes political, ethnic, and cultural factors. Several examples of scholarship that helps expand the concepts of how Jews identify their being “Jewish” and the variations within modern Jewish society are Eugene B. Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought: A Partisan Guide (New York: Behrman House, 1983); Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Benjamin Harshav, “Theses on the Historical Context of the Modern Jewish Revolution,” in The Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3–22; and Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1967).

[2] Samuel M. Brown, Where the Soul Hungers: One Doctor’s Journey from Atheism to Faith (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2021), 2.

[3] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 27.

[4] The Four Horsemen contributed many books and articles to the New Atheism movement. The core of their thinking individually and as a collective project can be found in the following books: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); and Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Toronto: Emblem, 2007). A good history of why these voices have become so dominant in many circles is found in Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[5] Tim Crane, The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 3–4.

[6] The term “New Atheists” refers to those writers and thinkers who are highly combative against religion and religious belief; see note 4.

[7] Crane, Meaning of Belief, 8.

[8] Crane, 8.

[9] Elsie Talmage Brandley, “The Religious Crisis of Today,” in At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, ed. Jennifer Reeder and Kate Holbrook (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017), 139.

[10] Steven L. Peck, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2015), xi.

[11] James K. A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), vii.

[12] The challenge of placing modern concepts of religion in the ancient past is not a new problem, and scholars have not spared much ink in discussing this topic. For more on why this can be a challenging conceptual space, see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); and Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 179–96.

[13] Taylor, Secular Age, 5.

[14] Marvin J. Ashton, “A Yearning for Home,” Ensign, October 1992, 23.

[15] James K. A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2019), 4–5.

[16] Cecil Roth, The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation (Oxford: The East and West Library, 1943), 158. So intense is the human self and human existence that in our refinement we need rest, realignment, and renewal.

[17] The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, trans. Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 101.

[18] Mishnah Shabbat 7.2 says:

The main classes of work are forty save one: sowing, ploughing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, cleansing crops, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking, shearing wool, washing or beating or dyeing it, spinning, weaving, making two loops, weaving two threads, separating two threads, tying [a knot], sewing two stitches, hunting a gazelle, slaughtering or flaying or salting it or curing its skin, scraping or cutting it up, writing two letters, erasing in order to write two letters, building, pulling down, putting out a fire, lighting a fire striking with a hammer and taking out aught from one domain into another. These are the main classes of work: forty save one.

The Mishnah, trans. Herbert Danby (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 106. All passages from Mishnah refer to Danby’s translation. See also Avram R. Shannon, “The Sabbath in Rabbinic Judaism: Exploring the How of Keeping the Commandments,” in this volume.

[19] What this past engagement by Christians has done with this example has not always been productive or entirely helpful, but there have been wonderful aspects that have bolstered Christian behavior in the past without doing harm to Judaism or Jewish communities. It is these kinds of generous engagements that I hope to draw out here.

[20] Rascal Flatts, “Mayberry,” track 4 on Melt, Lyric Street, 2002.

[21] John Bowker, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 830.

[22] Anne McCue, “Stupid,” track 3 on Roll, Messenger Records, 2003.

[23] Russell M. Nelson, “The Sabbath Is a Delight,” Ensign, May 2015, 129.

[24] Mark S. Diamond, “Shabbat in Jewish Thought and Practice,” in Understanding Covenants and Communities: Jews and Latter-day Saints in Dialogue, ed. Mark S. Diamond and Andrew C. Reed (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center and Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2020), 195–226.

[25] Roth, Jewish Contribution, 159.

[26] See Jason Robert Combs, “Christian Anti-Sabbath Polemic and the Textual Transmission of Luke 4:16 and 23:56,” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 26 (2021): 29–46; and Combs, “Sabbath and Sunday in Ancient Christianity: Second through Sixth Centuries,” in this volume.

[27] The Babylonian Talmud: A Translation and Commentary, trans. Jacob Neusner et al., 22 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2011), Shabbat 119a.

[28] Babylonian Talmud, Neusner translation, Shabbat 118b.

[29] Danby, Mishnah, 100.

[30] For a critical recent study of the various ways that communities read the biblical text and find purpose and meaning that can appear at odds with other readers, see Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2020), 1–24; and Jordan T. Watkins, Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Taken together, these books examine how readers of the Bible can find useable narratives from the text that inform how they see themselves and others, and how those various interpretations shape our current perceptions of ourselves over and against others.

[31] Hellmut Wilhelm, “The Concept of Time in the Book of Changes,” in Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 3, ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 214.

[32] Dan Bellm, “Sabbath,” Image Journal, 71.

[33] Mohammad Ben Ismaïl Al’Bukhari, Al’ Bukhari’s Sahih, trans. Mohammad Mahdi Al’Sharif (Beirut: Dar al-Kotob al-Ilmiya, 2003), 1:205. This text is viewed by Sunni Muslims as one of the six hadith (that is, accounts of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) collections, and it dates from around 846 CE.

[34] Colin Turner, Islam: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2011), 144.

[35] A. J. Droge, trans., The Qur’ān: A New Annotated Translation (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2017).

[36] Al’Bukhari, Sahih, 1:205, 209–210. At least some of the hadith literature indicates that the Prophet Muhammad also taught that it is not out of the question to brush one’s teeth (as an act of purification) before enjoining in prayer.

[37] Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 32.

[38] Levinas, Time and the Other, 32.

[39] N. T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential (New York: HarperOne, 2013), 74–75.

[40] Craig Harline, Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 4.

[41] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 15.

[42] Heschel, Sabbath, 3.

[43] Wright, Case for the Psalms, 75.

[44] Heschel, Sabbath, 14.

[45] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009), 21.

[46] Saint Augustine, Confessions, edited and translated by Carolyn J. B. Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2014), 1:5.

[47] Augustine, Confessions, 13:37.

[48] Douglas A. Martis, ed., The Mundelein Psalter (Chicago: Hillenbrand, 2007).

[49] Martis, Mundelein Psalter, 43.

[50] Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 183.

[51] Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 209.

[52] Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin, 1997), 64–65.

[53] There are various versions of this prayer, but the commonly accepted version of the prayer in the Eastern Church is as follows: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

[54] The September 1990 murder of Father Alexander Men outside of Moscow remains unsolved today, though many in the Orthodox community continue to observe this as a martyrdom. For more on the remarkable life of Alexander Men, see Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Alexander Men and His Times (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016).

[55] Alexander Men, An Inner Step Toward God: Writings and Teaching on Prayer by Father Alexander Men, ed. April French, trans. Christa Belyaeva (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2018), 13–14.

[56] Saint Ephraim, “Lenten Prayer of Saint Ephraim the Syrian,” in Pravoslavnyi tokovyi molitvoslov s kratkimi katikhizicheskimi svedeniiami, ed. Vilenskago Sviato-Dukhovskago Bratstva (St. Petersburg: Sinodal’naia Tipografiia, 1907), 139. Saint Ephraim’s “Lenten Prayer” is recited at Vespers, Matins, and other prayers, especially during the Great Fast (Lent).

[57] Samuel F. Weber, Proper of the Mass: Entrance, Offertory and Communion Antiphons for Sundays and Solemnities (San Francisco: Ingatius Press, 2014), 146. The scriptural text for this antiphon is Psalms 1:2–3.

[58] Martis, Mundelein Psalter, 11.