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I was intrigued to hear an argument that American democracy needs Christianity, and I was especially intrigued to hear it from an openly gay atheist. In all, the book is interesting. The argument basically goes like this: There are things that the U.S. constitution does not deal with (morality, ethics), and there need to be other institutions that step in to handle those things. The bargain between Christianity and the U.S. form of government has been that each will handle what it does best. Of course, that bargain has broken down. The church has become a political entity, and American politics has taken on the look of religious institutions (people worshiping at the alter of red and blue).

Two things Rauch assumes in this book (unsurprisingly, given that he works at a Washington thinktank): that liberalism is a desirable political system/ideology; that capitalism is a desirable economic arrangement. I think if he were to question those two terms, the argument might have to be rethought.

But also: I am not convinced that Christianity is the only way to fill the gap here. There are other ways that people can choose to organize themselves and address questions of morals and ethics. He might agree with this argument, but I think he's taking a pragmatic approach: Christianity is so big and powerful that we should look for ways to persuade Christians to change the church.

I picked this book up on a whim - I didn't really know anything about it. And now I am excited for Volume 2 and interested in what the translation schedule is for the remaining volumes (8 in total).

Yes, this is a Groundhog Day-like story, but it is much more than that. My favorite parts are when the character works through what it's like to attend to the same day over and over and also when she is trying to understand her relationship to her spouse as she remains stuck in this loop.

"Suddenly I remember the sounds of summer. I remember the creaking of the stairs. You don't hear it when there is moisture in the air, it is never there in winter, but there comes a point in the course of the summer when the stairs start to creak. It has to do with the wood drying out and you have to tread carefully, especially if you're going up or down the stairs when someone is sleeping. If it is the middle of the night or early in the morning when all else is still and when the dry creak fills the room if you don't set your feet very carefully and silently on step after step after step. It is a sound that speaks of summer and the many years those stairs have been there, of the generations of feet they have carried up and down. But when summer is over, in the middle of September or some time in October, the sound disappears from the stairs, the moisture seeps back into the wood and autumn sets in with its breezes and silent stairs." (95)

"Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it's a chemical reaction, I don't know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other's company. Maybe we are a weather system - condensation and evaporation." (46)