In "Twice on Sundays," Time Winton writes about the importance of church-going in his life. It is the specific act of going to church, rather than a more general and abstract "religion," which has shaped him and his experience of life. He remembers his youthful rebellion against it with distaste, as a demonstration of intellectual arrogance:

There I was, a university undergrad, pounding these old geezers into rhetorical corners, hurling all my ten-dollar words and half-digested book learning at them.

Winton does not attempt any Christian apologetics or theological arguments. His writing is descriptive, rather than argumentative. He has mixed feelings about church, which, when he was a child, both bored and exhausted him. The title of the piece refers to the structure of a typical Sunday, which had morning church and Sunday school, followed by lunch and an afternoon of visiting family, then more church in the evening. Winton writes:

Looking back I wonder if we only went to school on Monday for a breather.

However, Winton now realizes how the childhood experience of church-going had a profound effect on him. He says that, while church provided him with a community, it freed him from tribalism, giving him a sense of "what a civil life might be." It also gave him a sense of the mystery in the everyday. He recalls one man who told him that his soul was the size of a fist. At university, he would sneer at such illogical remarks, but to both the child and the adult, something about them rang true. Winton writes of religious belief as a visceral experience rather than an intellectual acceptance, describing his experience in physical and emotional terms:

On a Sunday evening, wherever I am I feel that tidal pull, the old melancholy descends, and it's as homely and as unsettling as the smell of the sea.