As is my preference, I'd love to excerpt at great length some portion of this book that summarizes one or more elements that capture what I liked about this book. But for a variety of reasons, I'm not finding that possible. For starters, Dionne weaves in numerous news stories that capture his own series of questions, hypothesis, and narratives alongside his own analysis. Which makes for great reading and I generally love his analysis. But I didn't particularly go into this book for a rehash of recent events that surround the intersection of faith & politics.

More importantly, though, I found myself enjoying this book more than anticipated. Mostly, that's due to the fact that the areas I wasn't sure I'd like, I found imminently useful. Dionne devotes the bulk of the final third of the book to his own Catholic vantagepoint, which I initially saw as a section to endure. But the parallels are remarkably similar enough that they added much more to my own internal discussion than I would have ever guessed.

The one singular issue I still leave with the book is Dionne's insistence that faith and politics are naturally intertwined:

The notion that religion should be disconnected from politics always seemed odd to me simply because I couldn't understand how you could separate the two. If religion mattered, and if the content of your faith was true, it had to affect all you did. And if politics also mattered, the obligation of the believer was to sort out how politics and faith related to each other.

(pg 16)

It's this point that I'm probably most questioning of and also an area that I still find somewhat incompletely answered by Boyd's thesis. In several instances, Boyd reminds us that we're to "offer our opinion" ... which doesn't wholly summarize what anyone who sees public service or political work as a vocation should see rightfully as Kingdom-building.

I do feel that Dionne highlights, however briefly, the point that we aren't to confuse our political views as Christian views, but I'm not convinced he argues that point to the logical extreme. But perhaps the bigger problem I take from Dionne's argument is that it still accepts a liberal/conservative political divide within Christianity and Judaism. Certainly, they exist in the real world and perhaps should just be openly discussed in that manner. Dionne is, after all, a political writer and not a theological writer. But it still strikes me as an incomplete narrative on what it is that Christ calls us to do.

Mind you, that doesn't make it a bad book in my mind. Obviously I'm on a reading binge of sorts in order to take in a lot of different views and see what I take from each. Next up, for instance, is Joel Hunter's "A Different Kind of Conservative." As much as I love listening to Hunter's sermons, I'm already finding his book just as problematic on many of the same levels I am with Dionne. It can be maddening if you let it. But I think we all grasp this point somewhat incompletely ... so why should it surprise us to see others do likewise? It's enough to sometimes lead me to only one true conclusion - that this Over the Rhine tune probably gets more right than anyone else writing today.