Let’s keep Sunday sacred

Newsday 27 February 2021

SUNDAY IS the soul of the nation. It is more than just a fanatical religious preoccupation. There is a reason why the day was woven into the fabric of our society. We have to save Sunday.

Historically, the practice of reserving a day for rest was the best thing for a fledging nation. It was biblical in intent and economical in its effect. It offered intangible rewards such as resting from the labours of life and connecting with the divine.

Most of that has changed, somewhat. Like the ebbing tide that erodes our shoreline, the will and ways of men have shaped this part of our existence and changed our perspective on the day. But there are grave consequences for the nation that does not seek their God and prefers to make Sunday like every other day.

It is so sad what has happened to Sunday, once a day of worship. Our fathers failed to instil in us the respect for the divine and the restful time that the day offers. For many it’s only time to play and dingolay, or even to make some more money. While a few faithful find respite in the solemn assembly of prayer, their hands are raised in praise and sometimes in protest at what our Sunday has become.

We have failed as a people to extol the virtues of the day. Although it’s justifiable that we should engage our time and energy towards acquiring wealth, the essence of our lives cannot be trifled away by sacrificing the only day we have for rest. Sunday must be set aside for the purpose of praise and thanksgiving and relaxation.

We must remember the fate of the great city of Rome and the debauchery, the wantonness, the festivities and flagrant disorders of the day. The same demise is certain for our nation if we reject the formula for success that is found in the wisdom of a day of rest.

The Samoa Government is about to permanently ban all commercial activities on Sundays.

Talanei  June 2020

The Samoa Government is about to permanently ban all commercial activities on Sundays.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said on Radio 2AP last week that he had instructed the Attorney General’s office to draft a law to permanently close business activities on Sundays.

Under the current COVID-19 State of Emergency orders, all major supermarkets have been allowed limited opening hours on Sunday evenings except smaller shops who are allowed to open “normal hours”..

Tuilaepa also introduced a ban on beach excursions as well as swimming in public swimming places like rivers and public swimming pools.

He quoted the Bible and referred to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah after straying into the ways of the devil.

“These are all clear in the Bible but these days other countries have legalized businesses such as prostitution,” he said.

He went on to say that currently his government was using the SOE Orders to do away with Sunday trading.

He said that people have been pushing to go back to normal Sunday trading but he said it is not going to happen and that all commercial activities shall cease on Sundays.

Religious gathering with Kanye West to fill up Sun Devil Stadium

Ktar  January 17, 2020 

PHOENIX – College football season is over, but a huge crowd is expected to converge on Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe on Saturday for a daylong religious gathering featuring rapper Kanye West.

All of the free tickets for Awaken 2020 were quickly snapped up online. The event’s website invites attendees “to be part of the Jesus awakening that is shifting HISTORY.”

West and his Sunday Service Collective gospel choir may be the biggest draw, but the event runs from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. with about a dozen evangelical leaders.

In addition to West, who released the Christian-themed album “Jesus is King” in October, Daniel Kolenda, David Herzog, Brian “Head” Welch, Cindy Jacobs, Jerame Nelson, Guillermo Maldonado, Jake Hamilton, Jeremy Riddle, Stephanie Herzog, Eddie James and Steve Swanson are scheduled to speak.

A Trum calendar: replacing the seventh day Sabbath for the first day Sunday?

Washington Times  December 31, 2019 

For more than 500 years, the most popular and influential book after the Bible was “The Golden Legend” by Jacobus de Varagine. At the end of the 13th century, Varagine was grappling with how medieval Christians perceived time: He mapped the liturgical calendar and the stories of feast-day saints associated with it. The book was a bestseller.

Flash forward to today. We now waste a great deal of time fumbling around with the flawed Gregorian calendar. For one thing, new calendars have to be printed ever year. What a waste of both time and money.

But this isn’t the only cost dished up by our Gregorian calendar. Indeed, there are a number of problems and inefficiencies associated with it. Under the Gregorian calendar, the scheduling of the days for holidays, sporting events and school schedules — to name but a few — must be redone each year. What a waste of time and money.

The Gregorian calendar also causes confusion when it comes to the age-old idea of “time is money.” For example, to determine how much interest accrues for a wide variety of instruments — bonds, mortgages, swaps, forward rate agreements, etc. — day counts are required. The current calendar contains complexities and anomalies that create day-count problems.

And there are other financial problems generated by the Gregorian calendar. For example, back in 2013, Apple was caught up in a quarterly reporting fiasco. Following its firt-quarter 2013 earnings announcement, Apple suffered its worst one-day loss in four years as a result of the company’s failure to meet Wall Street’s expectations. This was largely due to a simple calendar-generated error — most analysts failed to account for the fact that Apple’s Q1 2013 was one week shorter than the same quarter the year before.

The past 400 years have only seen a handful of cohesive efforts to standardize the modern calendar or iron out the kinks of the Gregorian calendar. The crusade for calendar modernization found one of its most prominent champions in 19th-century industrialist George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Co. Driven by a desire to create a more business-friendly calendar, he developed the “Eastman plan.” It was one of the first cogent models of a fixed (or permanent) calendar and was designed to eliminate the practical and financial inefficiencies generated by the Gregorian calendar system.

However innovative, the Eastman plan was in many respects crude, failing most crucially to account for and preserve the Sabbath. Like many past attempts at calendar reform, the Eastman plan was doomed by its failure to address religious and cultural concerns. Indeed, one of the major criticisms of such calendar reforms is that they interfered with religious days of rest, which play an integral role in the organization of economic activity, i.e. “the work week.”

Protestants and Catholics are so nearly united in sentiment

"Protestants and Catholics are so nearly united in sentiment, that it is not difficult to conceive how Protestants may make an image to the Beast. The mass of Protestants believe with Catholics in the Trinity, immortality of the soul, consciousness of the dead, rewards and punishments at death, the endless torture of the wicked, inheritance of the saints beyond the skies, sprinkling for baptism, and the PAGAN SUNDAY for the Sabbath; all of which is contrary to the spirit and letter of the new testament. Surely there is between the mother and daughters, a striking family resemblance."    Merritt E. Cornell, Facts for the Times, p. 76. 1858

The Sunday god

"We will make a few extracts, that the reader may see the broad contrast between the God of the Bible brought to light through Sabbath-keeping, and the god in the dark through Sunday-keeping. Catholic Catechism Abridged by the Rt. Rev. John Dubois, Bishop of New York. Page 5. Ques. Where is God? Ans. God is everywhere. Q. Does God see and know all things? A. Yes, he does know and see all things. Q. Has God any body? A. No; God has no body, he is a pure Spirit. Q. Are there more Gods than one? A. No; there is but one God. Q. Are there more persons than one in God? A. Yes; in God there are three persons. Q. Which are they? A. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Q. Are there not three Gods? A. No; the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, are all but one and the same God.

 These ideas well accord with those heathen philosophers.... We should rather mistrust that the Sunday god came from the same source that Sunday-keeping did."   J. B. Frisbie, Review & Herald, March 7, 1854, The Sunday God, p. 50 

Religious “blue laws” that sanctifies life outside of work

Vox  Oct 2, 2018

During a recent cross-country road trip this summer, my wife and I were driving around Little Rock, Arkansas, looking for a place to eat lunch. We had a hard time finding any place that was open. Then we realized it was Sunday.

It’s not too surprising that in conservative-leaning Arkansas, certain blue laws — or laws that restrict commerce on Sundays for religious reasons — remain in force in many parts of the state. Arkansas banned most businesses from opening on Sunday until 1982. Until 2009, it banned all Sunday liquor sales, which, in practice, shut down many establishments that served alcohol. Not until July of this year did the town of Fort Smith repeal a law banning dancing on Sundays. Many towns in Arkansas, including more left-leaning college towns, still maintain a wide array of local blue laws, especially regarding liquor.

While I’m not aware of a specific law that led to my difficulty finding a place to eat in Little Rock, the cultural tradition of blue laws was strong enough that restaurants offering Sunday brunch appeared far less common than in more secularized places where I’ve lived.

And in an era with increasingly fewer protections for workers, progressives and religious conservatives alike should unite to push for more blue laws that protect the sanctity of life outside of of work.

More.. 

Polish bishops favour outright ban on Sunday shopping

"Free Sundays is what all Catholics, non-Catholics and non-believers need,” Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, head of the Polish Episcopate, has said, as quoted by IAR.
He was speaking ahead of a meeting of Poland’s diocesan bishops during which they plan to discuss issues including a proposal to ban shopping on Sundays.
In July, a Polish trade union leader rejected calls to relax a proposal -- filed by his union and several other organisations in parliament last year -- to ban shopping throughout the country on Sundays and urged its passage through parliament, according to IAR.
Piotr Duda, leader of the Solidarity trade union, told IAR at the time that his union did not agree to "any further concessions” amid a push to restrict trade on Sundays in Poland.
"Four free Sundays [a month], period, end of story," Duda said, as quoted by IAR.
He made the comment after an organisation representing some of Poland’s retailers suggested that grocery stores across the country should be allowed to keep their doors open every Sunday, while employees could be provided with guarantees of at least two free Sundays a month.    Polan Radio

How Sunday stopped being special for the American worker

This month, workers who have been with Walmart for at least five years received a one-time bump in their paychecks. A couple hundred extra dollars is usually welcome, but this time, it actually symbolizes a loss: No longer will those workers receive premium pay for their Sunday shifts, as the idea of compensating people for toiling on what some consider a day of rest fades from American business.

Walmart discontinued Sunday premium pay, which had been $1 extra per hour, for new hires back in 2011. Those who had continued to receive it will receive a lump sum equal to half the amount of Sunday pay they received last year, according to a company release in January outlining a handful of adjustments that Walmart explained were a way of "simplifying its pay structure" — and reducing the overall cost of increasing base wages to $10 an hour across the board.

That hasn't worked out so well for more experienced employees like eight-year Walmart veteran Nancy Reynolds, a 69-year-old cashier in Merritt Island, Fla., who works Thursday through Monday. Her base pay was already slightly above $10 an hour, so she didn't get much of a raise, and the loss of a few extra Sunday dollars a week will hurt. "The younger people, the ones who haven’t been there that long, they got it, and I'm glad for them," Reynolds says. "But they did it at the expense of me and everybody who’s been there a long time."

In cutting Sunday pay, Walmart is actually behind most of the retail industry, which made that change as legal requirements to pay more on Sundays were stricken from state laws across the country. So-called "blue laws" once prohibited Sunday commerce altogether in 34 states in the 1960s. They were often weakened through compromise, with higher pay mandated in exchange for shopping being legalized. Even with no mandate, premium pay was often what the labor market demanded.

"To get people to work, when they’d never worked before, they started to pay Sunday pay," says Craig Rowley, a retail compensation consultant with Korn Ferry, who has done work for Walmart.

That changed over time as women entered the workforce, pushing more shopping from weekdays to the weekend. The labor market also loosened up, meaning workers couldn't pick and choose which days they wanted to work; Sunday shifts are now expected rather than optional. And meanwhile, the importance of Sunday as a universal day of rest started to recede from the American psyche.

"When I was growing up, Sundays were kind of family day, church day," Rowley says. "As we’ve gotten to be a more secular society, staying at home on Sunday is not necessarily expected. 'We’re all going to be here all day Sunday' is not as strong a cultural norm."

Rhode Island and Massachusetts are now two of the last states to require retailers to pay time and a half on Sundays, and the retail industry is pushing hard to get the requirement rolled back in Massachusetts. "Sundays in retail have become unaffordable in our state," wrote William Rennie, vice president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, in a Boston Globe op-ed.

Sunday premium pay hasn't disappeared as quickly from other sectors, such as manufacturing and transportation, which have held on to a more traditional five or six-day work schedule. Most federal employees are still entitled to time and a half on Sundays. But more and more of their neighbors in the private sector won't be so lucky.           Washington Post

The Vatican is this morning facing a further crisis after routine DNA tests revealed that the communion wafers used in Sunday mass contain 0% of the body and blood of Christ.

The Vatican is this morning facing a further crisis after routine DNA tests revealed that the communion wafers used in Sunday mass contain 0% of the body and blood of Christ.

The findings are sure to pile further pressure on the ailing religious organisation, just days after their Chief Executive resigned citing ‘personal reasons’ and ‘being a bit old’.

The news will concern billions of Catholic consumers, previously led to believe they were consuming Christ himself each Sunday morning during mass.

Catholic Simon Williams told us, “So what have I been eating all these years? It’s not horse again is it?”

“It’s always had a funny taste that I couldn’t quite place. But having been a choir boy in the catholic church I grew up being told by priests that putting strange things in my mouth was the done thing.”

“That said, with the amount of cash I’m encouraged to put in the collection plate on a Sunday morning I can’t believe they’re scrimping on the ingredients.”

“You’ll be telling me next that the stuff they dip the wafer in isn’t actually blood.”

Catholic crisis

A spokesperson for the Vatican explained that the DNA test results merely highlight the incompatibility of science and religion.

They told us, “Where is your faith that the wafer is the body of Christ? Science can’t tell you everything, and just as it can’t prove God doesn’t exist, it can’t prove the wafer ISN’T the body of Christ.”

“Oh, it has done exactly that? Right. Well.  There’s probably something in the Bible about that. I’ll have to go and look.”         NewsThump

Pope emphasizes importance of rest

November 09, 2015

The sanctification of Sunday rest, the right to a pension in retirement, and dignified work are all intertwined, Pope Francis said in an address in St. Peter’s Square on November 7.

The “principle, subject, and end” of the economy and of all social institutions is the human person, the Pope told 23,000 employees of the Italian National Social Security Institute. “His dignity cannot ever be compromised, even when he ceases to be economically productive.”

Catholic Culture