The Christian Century

Not one but two books about a single day of the week? I didn’t plunge with much enthusiasm into either one. The topic seemed too massive (one day of the week totals one-seventh of human history!) or too passé. But both books surprised me, held my attention, taught me things I didn’t know and made me think. And yet they are very different from each other.

Craig Harline’s Sunday is a sprawling narrative with a journalistic feel, ostensibly answering the question of how we got to where we are on Sunday, a day we all care about but for wildly divergent reasons. While he doesn’t tackle the causes of emerging views of Sunday as satisfactorily as I might have liked, the story itself is fascinating.