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Author Judith Shulevitz in Conversation with James Carroll
A conversation between Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time and James Carroll, the Boston Globe
The Harvard Club, New York City
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Sabbath is not just the day of rest. It is also an ideal to be lived up to—the vision of a time outside time and the promise of a less pressured existence. Where did the Sabbath come from? What will we lose if it disappears? Can it teach us new ways to think about time, even if we no longer follow its rules?
"[Shulevitz] explains the urgency of a Sabbath in our own age, when mobile time makes it near impossible for us to carve out any discrete space to connect with family and community, or even just the concrete world. She makes you conscious of time and its moral implications in an entirely new way."
–Hanna Rosin, Double X
"[Shulevitz] is terribly persuasive in marshaling sociology to suggest that we revisit the virtues of a day of rest. . . . She shows how everything from the first public clocks in the 14th century to new management techniques in the 20th has conspired to rob us of leisure. She avoids pastoral sentimentalizing of the days of yore, but she is always clear-eyed about what we have given up, we who depend on our CrackBerrys."
–Mark Oppenheimer, The Jewish Forward
Judith Shulevitz is an essayist and literary critic. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and Slate, the cultural editor of Slate, and the editor of Lingua Franca. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including the New Republic and the New Yorker. She lives in New York City.
James Carroll is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including An American Requiem (winner of the National Book Award) and the bestseller Constantine's Sword. His most recent book is Practicing Catholic, and he writes a weekly column for the Boston Globe.