单项选择题

Once upon a time, in the "Dominion of New Haven" it was illegal to kiss your children on Sunday. Or make a bed or cut your hair or eat mince pies or cross a river unless you were a clergyman riding your circuit. If you lived in Connecticut in 1650, there was no mistaking Sunday for just another shopping day; regardless of whether you’d go to hell for breaking the Sabbath (安息日), you could certainly go to jail. Centuries later, the sense that Sunday is special is still wired in us, a miniature sabbatical (休假) during which to peel off the rest of the week and savor ritual, religious or otherwise.
The idea that rest is a right has deep roots in our history. Blue laws were a gift as much as a duty, a command to relax and reflect. America does not readily sit still, even for a day. The Civil War and a demand for news brought the Sunday paper into being; industrialization inspired progressives to argue that libraries and museums should open on Sundays so working people could elevate themselves. Major league baseball held its first Sunday game in 1892. Over time, Sunday has gone from a day we could do only a very few things to the only day we can do just about anything we want.
If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan, Albert Schweitzer said—which raise a question for our times: what do we lose if Sunday becomes just like any other day Lawmakers in Virginia got to spend part of their summer break debating that question, thanks to a mistake they made last winter when they unintentionally revived a "day of rest" rule: hotels and hospitals and nuclear power plant would have had to give workers a weekend day off or be fined $500. After a special legislative session was convened to fix the error, Virginia’s workers, like the rest of us, are once more potentially on call 24/7. Social conservatives may want to honor the Fourth Commandment, but businesses want the income, states need the tax revenues, and busy families want the flexibility.
With progress, of course, comes backlash from those who desperately want to preserve the old ways. Mom-and-pop liquor stores (夫妻酒店) in New York fought to keep the Blue laws to have more time with their families. Chich-fil-A, a chain of more than 1,100 restaurants in 37 states, closes on Sundays because its founder, Truett Cathy, promised employees time to "worship, spend time with family and friends or just plain rest from the work week", says the chain’s website. "Made sense then, still makes sense now." Pope John Paul even wrote a letter in defense of Sunday: "When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes merely part of a ’weekend’," he wrote, "people stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see ’the heavens’."
In an age with no free time, we buy it through hard choices. Do we skip church so we can sleep in or skip soccer so we can go to church or find a family ritual—cook together, read together, a Parcheesi challenge—that we treat as sacred That way, at least some part of Sunday faces in a different direction, whether toward heaven or toward one another. People in Connecticut in 1650