Read an excerpt from SABBATH IN THE SUBURBS: A FAMILY’S EXPERIMENT WITH HOLY TIME by MaryAnn McKibben Dana

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: There was a time in America when Sundays meant a day for worship, for leisure, for spending time with family and friends.

But that was before the advent of round-the-clock shopping, cell phones, and email that place us on call 24 hours a day.

REV. MARYANN MCKIBBEN DANA: People are feeling the burden and the pressure of a fast-paced world and wanting to find some alternatives, a new rhythm of being, and how Sabbath is part of that conversation.

VALENTE: It’s an idea as old as the Bible, recorded in the book of Exodus—one of the Ten Commandments, in which God is said to have told Moses, “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy. In it thou shalt not do any work.”

MCKIBBEN DANA: We’ll take a few minutes to share, tell the people at your table about that and why it creates Sabbath for you, or why it helps make Sabbath happen for you.

VALENTE: Now, a growing number of pastors is trying to help people reclaim at least one day of the week for Sabbath, time set aside for spiritual, mental and physical renewal—whether it’s Sunday or even another day. It’s been described as “the most precious present mankind has received from the treasure house of God.”

These clergy members are here to explore realistic ways that people can observe the Sabbath despite all of the distractions and interruptions families face on a day that’s supposed to be “holy time.”

MCKIBBEN DANA: Sabbath is the great leveler. I mean, if we take that seriously as a culture, it means that no matter what your life situation, whether you are Bill Gates or the person who cleans Bill Gates’ office, you have an inherent dignity and for a time each week, you do not need to defend your existence. To prove your worth in the culture and the marketplace.

Male workshop participant: There is a sense of, boy, I’m important, I’ve got 35 emails and 10 text messages today.

Female workshop participant: God didn’t say, “Gee, you should take a day off.” God said, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Oh, take a day, sure, take a day. No, it was, “Do this, this is my commandment.”

MCKIBBEN DANA: We can think about it in a very fixed way, that it’s one day where we don’t do any work. But we can also think about Sabbath in, I think, a lot of different ways and I think we can help our parishioners think about Sabbath in a different way.

VALENTE: MaryAnn McKibben Dana, a Presbyterian minister from Springfield, Virginia, chronicled her own family’s struggle to set aside one day a week in a book called “Sabbath in the Suburbs: A Family’s Experiment with Holy Time.” Now she leads workshops across the country, trying to help others find some Sabbath time during each week.

MCKIBBEN DANA: We all left things undone to be here. Let it be. I also find this a helpful way to start my Sabbath, is to say, “What has been done has been done, what has not been done has not been done. Let it be.”

VALENTE: McKibben Dana was working full-time as a pastor and pregnant with her third child when she decided something in her hectic life had to change. She and her husband vowed to set aside one day of the week when they didn’t work, run errands, shop or return emails.

MCKIBBEN DANA: People ask us, “How did you do that? How did you even make that work?” Well, people do this, you know. I mean the Jewish tradition still has a very strong component of Sabbath keeping to it.

VALENTE: But it wasn’t easy. Because McKibben Dana is a pastor and has duties on Sunday, she and her family decided to observe their Sabbath on Saturdays.

Son: (playing Jenga): And then I knock it down!

MCKIBBEN DANA: (to son) No, that’s not how you play the game…

MCKIBBEN DANA: We realized that in our own faith we really have a resource in the Sabbath as an invitation from God, a command from God, to say, one time a week you set all that aside and you just enjoy one another and you enjoy God.

We don’t have to be anywhere, and they love to hear that. They call it, they call it the Sabbath but they also call it the “stay at home day.”

We’ll light a candle to sort of remind ourselves that this is a time set apart and we don’t make a big deal out of that. We just have it there. We also may have music playing in the background which puts us in a different kind of frame of mind.

VALENTE: The giant TV screen in the basement remains mute. The computer is turned off. The family doesn’t use the phone to make calls, but it will accept calls from friends.

MCKIBBEN DANA: Just being in conversation with our loved ones is a way to get in touch with the sacred part of life and so with the right intention and the right attention I think we can really see how God encounters us in all aspects of our lives.

The church is really called I think to be a counter-cultural voice, to say, you are enough, you do enough, there is a time each week where you can just stop.

If you let yourself try it and enter into it however you can with a couple of hours or a half of day, you will see a change over the course of your practice of doing it.

(to daughter): I wonder if Margaret and Caroline can get out the ingredients that are listed there. Okay?

VALENTE: McKibben Dana stresses that observing Sabbath doesn’t mean doing only things that seem traditionally religious or holy, but making “holy” the acts of ordinary life.

MCKIBBEN DANA: (to son) We’ll put these in the oven and then we’ll make lunch.

(singing at table) For help and strength and daily food we give you thanks, O Lord…

MCKIBBEN DANA: For some people the idea of taking off an entire day either feels overwhelming, or it really is logistically impossible, and so I tell people to start where you are. A lot of us don’t have an entire day at our disposal but we might have one morning on the weekend.

(to daughter) Oh, I see ducks in the water…

MCKIBBEN DANA: We love physical activity as part of our Sabbath. We love going to the state park near our house and we’ve been able to see the changing of the seasons and having the time on Sabbath to do that has really been very special for our family.

Psalm 90 is one of those beautiful psalms about time. And the passage of time. The psalmist says, “Teach us to count our days, that we might have a wise heart.” And I think that’s something that the Sabbath helps us to do, to be mindful about the passage of time.

Sabbath helps us count our days, and make them count. And not just be about doing and producing and more, more, more, but to be content and to appreciate the gift and the beauty of this day that we have.

VALENTE: And perhaps reclaim something from Scripture, which says that on the seventh day, even God rested. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente reporting.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: For some months, Pooja, a 22 year old mother of three, has been coming to this crisis counseling center in a lower middle class neighborhood of Delhi.

Pooja is trying to keep her family together. Her husband and in-laws—with whom she lived in the common tradition here—threw her out of the house. The problem: all three of her children are girls.

POOJA: The family says they need sons to carry on their name and since I have only three daughters, they tried to trick me into signing divorce papers so that their son could marry again. That led to some violence when I refused and I had to run away to my mother’s house for our safety.

DE SAM LAZARO: The preference for boy children dates back centuries—driven by religious custom.

RANJANA KUMARI (Center for Social Research): Only boys can look after the parents, they are the only ones who can perform the last rites. They are the only ones who will continue the family lineage. If all that is there then why will anybody wants to have a girl child? And also on the top of that you have to pay a dowry.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ranjani Kumari has studied the dowry system, which she says is mistakenly believed to have roots in Hindu scriptures.

KUMARI: This was never a practice anywhere prescribed but certainly it was said that when the princess goes, she must carry a number of horses because she’s used to a certain level of comfort, and so it is the duty of the king to insure the daughter is…and that gets distorted so that even the poorest of the poor who cannot afford two square meals will also have to buy things for the wedding of the daughter.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dowries were outlawed half a century ago but the system remains pervasive and adds a huge commercial dimension to marriage in India. With rising aspirations in a rapidly growing economy, sociologist Ravinder Kaur says daughters have become a financial liability.

RAVINDER KAUR (Indian Institute of Technology): They don’t want to pay dowries. They want to receive dowries. They want to give more education to the boys than to the girls, because for them, the boys are still more important.

DE SAM LAZARO: India’s census starkly bears out that bias. For every 1,000 male babies born, there are just 914 females—far fewer in some regions. In nature, the numbers are about equal. The gap began to widen in the 1990s with the advent of ultrasonography, allowing early detection of a fetus’ sex. That’s been blamed for the widespread abortion of female fetuses.

(from 2001 footage): So this is your clinic?

Dr. Kakodkar: (from 2001 footage) Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Abortion is legal in India but it is illegal when done for sex selection. However, tracking the intent is almost impossible as gynecologist Prakash Kakodkar admitted with startling candor in a story I reported in 2001. He does them routinely.

(to Dr. Kakodkar): So you freely admit that you do, basically, contravene the law. I mean…

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR: Yes, most of us do, I would say. I wouldn’t deny that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Do you face any legal sanctions?

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR: No, that’s what I said: there is no legal sanction because there is nothing on paper. I mean, who can ask you?

DE SAM LAZARO: The lopsided sex ratio has only spread in recent years. Two decades ago it was mainly in the northern farm states, where many families were entering the middle class thanks to India’s green revolution. Now Kaur says it’s in areas where a new middle class is emerging.

KAUR: Places like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, which are becoming more prosperous where there will be greater availability of technology and more incomes in the hands of families, they will tend to shape the family and sex select.

DE SAM LAZARO: As these areas become more affluent, fertility rates—the number of children born per woman—are declining. That’s welcomed by people concerned about population growth. These are some of India’s most densely populated regions. But when it comes to gender balance, it’s not good news, Professor Kaur says.

KAUR: You know when you want a smaller family, then the squeeze is on the girls because interestingly, suppose you’re moving from a fertility rate of four, to three. Then you want two boys and one girl. So if a lot of families in populous states want two boys and one girl, then obviously there’s going to be a great excess of boys.

DE SAM LAZARO: She says the social consequences of this demographic shift are already visible in those northern farm states, where there’s a growing shortage of brides.

KAUR: And as a result, men in these states have been importing brides from let’s say the east of India, the south of India, they’re sort of going shopping for brides wherever they can and many people call it “bride trafficking.”

DE SAM LAZARO: These marriages across India’s diverse cultural landscape can be fraught with social complication. But at the same time, Kaur sees an ever so slight improvement in the gender ratio in those states that saw early prosperity.

KAUR: Once people reach the higher realms of the middle class, which are called the stable middle class, they don’t sex select. Then they tend to view girls and boys as being of equal value. So they don’t really care whether they have two girls, whether they have one girl, one boy, etcetera.

DE SAM LAZARO: But for many years, India will present a patchwork of progress—a worsening gender balance in many places, slight improvement in some. The Center for Social Research’s Kumari sees one more positive development that’s a consequence of India’s growing and urbanizing middle class: more girls are going to school.

RANJANA KUMARI: As I said, India is full of contradictions. On the one side you see women in the villages still very disempowered but on the other side there is a brighter picture. We have the largest number of doctors, lawyers, professionals, our education level is going up for the girls. When you look at the new economy girls have got lot of new opportunities, you know, media, IT industry banking, entertainment. Whichever sector you see, women are filling the ranks in a very major way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Counseling center client Pooja never set foot in a school but she wants an education for her daughters. And that’s why she says she needs her husband’s help to provide it.

POOJA: Women are progressing more in society and I need the support of their father so that they can grow up in a proper family, so that they can get a good education, so that they can grow up and have good marriages.

DE SAM LAZARO: She’ll have an uphill battle—socially if not legally—to provide daughters with the family structure she calls ideal. But she says the best dowry her daughters could have is an education.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in New Delhi.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now a special report. Fifty years ago this fall, Pope John XXIII summoned church leaders to Rome for a series of meetings on how to make the church more relevant in the modern world. This Second Vatican Council, as it was known, produced some significant changes in Catholic life. Fifty years later, the legacy of Vatican II is still debated, and that debate has been evident in the current crisis between the Vatican and many US nuns. In April, the Vatican accused the umbrella group that represents the majority of American nuns of “doctrinal confusion.” But many of these sisters say they are just following the spirit of Vatican II. Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: In Washington, D.C., Sister Maureen Fiedler hosts the public radio program Interfaith Voices. She tries to broaden interreligious understanding in order to further justice and peace, values she says come straight from her Roman Catholic faith.

SISTER MAUREEN FIEDLER (Host, Interfaith Voices): This isn’t something peripheral. This is central to the preaching of the Gospel.

LAWTON: Fiedler entered religious life 50 years ago, just before Vatican II got underway. She says the spirit of the Vatican meetings had a profound impact on how she viewed her calling.

FIEDLER: The Second Vatican Council had a marvelous document called “The Church in the Modern World,” which basically underlined the message of justice and peace in the Gospel.

LAWTON: Fiedler became involved in a series of social justice causes, including a 37-day fast in support of the Equal Rights Amendment and rallies in support of the ordination of female priests.

FIEDLER: It just all fit together as a piece for me, and it also fit together in my prayer as I tried to put this together with the Second Vatican Council. It simply made sense to try to alleviate the suffering of the poor, to end wars, to overcome discrimination. That for me was Christianity.

LAWTON: But some critics say many Catholic sisters have been using the Second Vatican Council to justify positions and activities that are in conflict with official church teachings. Colleen Carroll Campbell is a columnist and author.

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL (Author, My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir): This idea that having this Second Vatican Council and pronouncing that there’s this amorphous spirit that gives us license to pretty much throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak, when it comes to Catholic doctrine—it’s simply wrong, and I think we’ve heard over and over from Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI that it’s wrong.

LAWTON: Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962 in order, as he put it, to “open a window and let in a little fresh air.”

PROFESSOR COLLEEN MCDANNELL (Professor of History and Religious Studies, University of Utah and Author, The Spirit of Vatican II): Even though in the United States there were a lot of changes going on in the 40’s and 50’s after the Second World War, in worldwide Catholicism these changes really hadn’t occurred. And so in order to open up a window for the whole church, not just in modernized countries, this council was called.

LAWTON: Over the next three years, church leaders at the council produced 16 documents on a host of topics, from introducing local languages into the Mass to expanding lay involvement and promoting more interfaith dialogue. One of the documents focused on religious life. It encouraged Catholic sisters to reexamine their mission, their rules, even their style of dress.

FIEDLER: It called us to go back and look at our foundresses and the spirit in which they started the communities, and when you look at those women who were foundresses, none of them are pussycats, I’m here to tell you. They were strong women who did things and started ministries that were, in many ways, unheard of in their own day.

LAWTON: Many US sisters began modifying or even eliminating the traditional habit. The clothing changes for prioresses of the Dominican sisters in Amityville, New York, were dramatic.

SISTER MARY HUGHES (Dominican Sisters of Amityville): You’ll see in the early years it was very much the same, and then there were some modifications, and then right after Vatican II, immediately, Mother Francis Maureen Carlin is in the modified habit completely, Sister Irene Garvey is in a white suit, and then from Mary Ryan on you’ll see suits, you’ll see various forms of clothing.

LAWTON: Sister Mary Hughes is the current prioress. She says even more than clothing changes, Vatican II urged nuns to get out into the community.

HUGHES: I think that’s one of the great gifts of Vatican II—that it sent us back to study what the Gospels were saying, and over and over again it was about feed the hungry, visit those in prison, help the poor.

LAWTON: The Dominican sisters in Amityville have a variety of ministries designed to help those at the margins, such as literacy classes to teach new immigrant women English. There are homes to help women and children with nowhere else to live, and there’s even an organic garden, where about 20 percent of the produce is donated to an interfaith food network.

Under an umbrella organization called the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, or LCWR, many communities of nuns began shifting their ministries in the wake of Vatican II. For some sisters, it was an exhilarating time. But others were concerned.

MCDANNELL: There was a minority of women who didn’t feel that the changes were appropriate, that the adaptations to modern life, the moving out of the parish into the world, that these movements had gone too far.

LAWTON: Some nuns became part of a separate organization that holds more traditional views.

SISTER MARY JOSEPH HEISLER (Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus): The Vatican II documents are a pretty straightforward read. I think the difficulty comes when you don’t read everything in context, perhaps. I would find it difficult to read the documents, then come up with them saying something more than what they say.

LAWTON: The LCWR still represents about 80 percent of the some 57,000 American nuns. The group has increasingly taken on advocacy positions, including some that are controversial.

MCDANNELL: These are the sisters that publicly stated to John Paul II that women should be ordained, that women should be allowed to work in all the ministries of the church. This is the same organization that signed the New York Times letter which said that there is a legitimate, diverse opinion on the question of abortion.

LAWTON: Sister Mary Hughes is immediate past president of the LCWR and still part of its leadership team.

HUGHES: Are there persons who have divergent opinions? I think that’s true in the whole church; it’s not just true in religious life. I think sometimes there’s a concern if we raise a question that means that we are in defiance, and that’s not at all what happens. But I think we’re going to continue to raise the questions, because there might be areas that we would hope the church would look at.

LAWTON: In 2008, Vatican officials began an investigation into the lives and doctrine of US women religious. This past April, the Vatican released a report accusing the LCWR of having “serious doctrinal problems.” The assessment specifically criticized the group for being largely silent on right-to-life issues, and it mandated that the group come under the authority of some US bishops.

HUGHES: We’re stuck with a situation that a mandate that we are not happy about, that we answered all the questions that we’re given to us in the doctrinal assessment honestly, carefully, prudently, and when we didn’t hear back, I guess we thought that we were believed. And I think there are aspects of the mandate that make us wonder if our materials were read.

LAWTON: For example, Hughes says she believes there is more than one way to promote the sanctity of human life. She says her community’s ministries against domestic violence and in support of homeless mothers and children is also prolife work.

HUGHES: That’s about the sanctity of human life. It’s about doing it differently. I think it’s complementary. I don’t think you can have one without the other.

LAWTON: Others say that’s not enough.

CAMPBELL: We’re talking about defending the sanctity of every human life from the cradle to the grave, defending the sanctity of marriage as the church sees marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and just generally promoting church teaching, and upholding that teaching and witnessing with joy to that, and that’s not what many lay Catholics have seen.

LAWTON: Professor McDannell says since the death of John the XXIII church leaders have appeared to be consolidating authority.

MCDANNELL: The new generation of men want a Catholic Church which is more traditional, which is more devotional, which is more willing to be obedient to the authority.

LAWTON: Some wonder if there is any room for dialogue and debate.

FIEDLER: This is not just about the Vatican versus the nuns. This really is about the future of how we interpret the message of the Second Vatican Council, and what’s going on right now quite frankly makes me sad, because I see certain people in Rome, in the Vatican, who want retrenchment, who want to go back to the church the way it was before the Second Vatican Council, when the church was essentially the hierarchy, and they determined everything down to sometimes the minutia of Catholic life.

CAMPBELL: Women religious need to stand with the Church, and if they don’t feel that they can in good conscience do that anymore then I think it would take more integrity to simply step back and say, you know, maybe we’re not called to be Catholic women religious anymore. Maybe we want to be something else.

LAWTON: Many lay Catholics have been rallying in support of the sisters. Hughes says they been getting letters of encouragement from across the country. She says she remains hopeful that, in the spirit of Vatican II, healing can prevail.

HUGHES: There’s always a blessing that comes with every conflict. Perhaps the blessing is that we continue to open up within the Church avenues for true dialogue and true dialogue isn’t about winners and losers. It’s about people truly being able to listen to understand the other perspective before making any judgments.

LAWTON: LCWR members will be meeting in St. Louis in early August to discuss their official response to the Vatican assessment.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.