God's Plan for Rhythm and Time

Slides to a presentation on how God created us to rest first, and then let life and work flow out of that rest.

Christian Spiritual Development Based on the Gospels:  A Diagram

Slides to a presentation based on the structure of the Gospel of Matthew, and how Jesus’ Great Commission is built on the faith, desires, character, and skills that he was building in his disciples. It uses UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” and translates it into a diagram for Christian growth. This presentation connects these stages or challenges to various resources on this website.

Christian Spiritual Formation

Link to a page on our website, which lists Christian resources related to desire and the shaping of desire.

Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. Random House Trade Paperbacks | Amazon book, Apr 2011.

Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of NOW. Westminster John Knox Press | Amazon page, 2014.

Tish Harrison Warren, Spiritual Direction: Get More Sleep. InterVarsity, Oct 29, 2013.

Kyla Wahlstrom, Changing Times: Findings From the First Longitudinal Study of Later High School Start Times. NASSP Bulletin, December 2002. On the policy and politics, see Danielle Dreilinger, How To Make School Start Later. Education Next Journal, May 21, 2019.

Duke Medicine News and Communications, Poor Sleep More Dangerous for Women. Duke Medicine, Mar 10, 2008.

Camille Peri, Ten Things to Hate About Sleep Loss. Web MD, Sep 14, 2012.

Maria Popova, Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized. Brain Pickings, Dec 16, 2012.

John de Graaf, When America Came 'This Close' to Establishing a 30-Hour Workweek.  AlterNet, Apr 2, 2013.  Labor unions almost succeeded in 1933.

Hank Green, Sleep: Why We Need It and What Happens Without It. SciShow, Oct 14, 2013.

Alicia Chang, Study: Brains Sweep Out Toxic Junk While We Sleep. Talking Points Memo, Oct 18, 2013.

Seth Maxon, How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body. The Atlantic, Dec 30, 2013.

George Dvorsky, Why We Need to Sleep in Total Darkness. io9 blog, Jan 8, 2014.

Julie Beck, The Town That's Building Life Around Sleep. The Atlantic, Feb 5, 2014.

Michael Hyatt, If You Want to Be More Productive, Get More Sleep. blog, Feb 18, 2014.

Justin Scuiletti, Losing Sleep Can Lead to Brain Damage. PBS, Mar 19, 2014.

Jason Feifer, When Genius Slept. New York Magazine, Jun 8, 2014.

Matt Connolly, Something Bizarre Happens to Your Brain When You Don't Get Enough Sleep. News Mic, Jul 19, 2014.

Cody C. Delistraty, To Work Better, Work Less. The Atlantic, Aug 8, 2014.

Cody C. Delistraty, Let the Body Rest, for the Sake of the Brain. The Atlantic, Oct 23, 2014.

UC Berkeley, Sleep Deficit Linked to Accumulation of Alzheimer's Protein and Memory Loss. Neuroscience News, Jun 1, 2015.

Lydia Ramsey and Jessica Orwig, 12 Science-Backed Habits to Get a Better Night's Sleep. Business Insider, Mar 18, 2016.

Justin Wolfers, A Family-Friendly Policy That’s Friendliest to Male Professors. New York Times, Jun 24, 2016.  “rest” can reinforce male privilege

Jeff Harder, Is Our Fear of Insomnia What's Actually Keeping Us Up at Night? Boston Globe, Aug 17, 2016.

Marie-Pierre St. Onge, Anja Mikic, Cara E. Pietrolungo, Effects of Diet on Sleep Quality. Advances in Nutrition, Sep 2016.  establishes correlations, as the relationship appears to be mutual and reciprocal. Sarah Frank, Kelli Gonzalez, Lorraine Lee-Ang, Marielle C. Young, Martha Tamez, and Josiemer Mattei, Diet and Sleep Physiology: Public Health and Clinical Implications. Frontiers in Neuroscience, Aug 2017.  “Dietary quality and intake of specific nutrients can impact regulatory hormonal pathways to alter sleep quantity and quality. Sleep, in turn, affects the intake of total energy, as well as of specific foods and nutrients, through biological and behavioral mechanisms. Initial research in this field focused primarily on the effects of short sleep duration on nutritional quality.”

Lynn Parramore, The Average American Worker Takes Less Vacation Time Than a Medieval Peasant. Business Insider, Nov 7, 2016.

Sarah DiGiulio, The Terrifying Way Not Sleeping Enough Actually Changes Your Gut. Huffington Post, Dec 23, 2016.

Catherine Clifford, Olympic Hero Michael Phelps Says the Secret to His Success is One Most People Overlook. CNBC News, Feb 14, 2017.

Jenny Anderson, Economists Quantified What Sleep Deprivation Does to Mother's Pay and Productivity. Quartz, Feb 17, 2017.

Arianna Huffington, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time. Harmony | Amazon book, Apr 2017.

Andy Coghlan, The Brain Starts to Eat Itself After Chronic Sleep Deprivation. New Scientist, May 23, 2017.

Terry Gross, Sleep Scientist Warns Against Walking Through Life 'In An Underslept State'. NPR, Oct 16, 2017.

Elizabeth Bruenig, America is Obsessed with the Virtue of Work. What About the Virtue of Rest? Washington Post, Apr 25, 2018.

Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner | Amazon page, June 19, 2018.

Chris Bailey, Why Being Lazy Is Actually Good for You. Time, Aug 28, 2018.

Judith Shulevitz, Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore. The Atlantic, Nov 2019.  “Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll on American society.”

Sushma Subramanian, A ‘Modern’ Depression Is Creeping Into Japanese Workplaces. The Atlantic, Oct 16, 2019.  “Young employees want to stand up for themselves, but many don’t know how”; examines the significance of limits and communication.

Korin Miller, 5 Surprising Things That Happen to Your Body When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep. Get Pocket, Dec 1, 2020. Weakened immune system, increased risk of heart disease, lowered sex drive, risk of weight gain, risk of diabetes.

Iman Ghosh, Chart: A Global Look at How People Spend Their Time. Visual Capitalist, Dec 11, 2020.  stats by country on paid work; education; sleep; other unpaid work; housework and shopping; personal care; eating and drinking; other leisure. This shatters the myth of laziness of non-white people. Also by gender, “Women spend nearly three times more in unpaid care work compared to men—a whopping total of 1.1 trillion hours each year—which means a lot less leisure time.”

Deutsche Welle, Burnout: The Truth About Overwork and What We Can Do About It. DW Documentary, Apr 29, 2022. This excellent 42 minute video documentary starts with two documents on English law: The Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, which was eroded by the Enclosure Movement.

Corey Whelan, ‘I’m a Cardiologist, and This Is Why I Recommend Everyone Have a Bedtime (and Stick to It)’. Well and Good, Mar 10, 2023. “The study included 2,000 people of varying races and ethnicities. It found that those with highly irregular sleep schedules, like overnight and rotating shift workers, were the ones most likely to have significant atherosclerosis and other markers for heart disease.”

Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Portfolio | Amazon page, Mar 2024. Newport argues that measuring productivity is from the realm of manufacturing but not the realm of ideas and service.

Guðmundur D. Haraldsson, Jack Kellam & Rowan Trickett, On Firmer Ground: Iceland’s Ongoing Experience of Shorter Working Weeks. Autonomy Institute, Oct 25, 2024. See also Olesya Dmitricova, Iceland Embraced a Shorter Work Week. Here’s How It Turned Out. CNN, Oct 25, 2024. See also María Hjálmtýsdóttir, Iceland’s Shorter Working Week Has Been a Huge Success – And It’s Changed My Family’s Life. The Guardian, Nov 21, 2024.

Erik Baker, Elon Musk Is the World’s Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor? New York Times, Feb 27, 2025. Mr. Musk recently remarked. “Working the weekend is a superpower.” This association between incessant work and entrepreneurial success is pervasive in American business culture today. Jeff Bezos reports working 12 hours every day of the week in the early years of Amazon. The Apple chief executive Tim Cook is famous for sending emails at 4:30 a.m. Mr. Musk’s ostensible boss, despite his well-known fondness for TV news and social media, also insists that “no president ever worked harder than me.”

Shawn Fain: Workers Deserve More Time for Themselves. Jacobin Magazine, Mar 15, 2025. On Thursday, March 14, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders introduced a Senate bill that would mandate a standard thirty-two-hour workweek with no loss in pay. The same day, Sanders chaired a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to discuss the legislation; among those invited to speak was United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain. We here provide Fain’s remarks in full; the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

“We find workers working longer hours. We have workers working seven days a week, twelve hours a day. There are workers, union or not, working multiple jobs, and they’re living to work, they’re scraping to get by, and they’re living paycheck to paycheck. We find workers today working deep into their sixties, seventies, and eighties because they can’t afford to retire.

We find associated deaths of despair, from addiction and suicide, of people who don’t feel a life of endless, hopeless work is a life worth living. Workers have been sacrificed at the altar of greed, and they’ve been stripped of their dignity.

We have a mental health crisis we talk about a lot in this country. But we never talk about the causes of that. There have been studies: increases in stress from working seven days a week, twelve hours a day — you’re sacrificing family life and things you want to pursue — it causes increases in cortisol levels, which leads to heart disease, cancer, strokes.

Given all those facts, if someone is lucky enough to retire — typically after they’ve worked themselves to death their entire life — they face knee replacements, shoulder surgeries, and spend the rest of their lives figuring out how they’re going to survive.

It’s sad to say that in 1933, the US Senate passed legislation to establish the thirty-hour workweek, but due to intense corporate opposition, that legislation failed. But in 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing a forty-hour workweek — eighty-four years ago. Eighty-four years ago, the forty-hour week was established. Since then, we’ve had a 400 percent increase in productivity, but nothing’s changed.”