The Love That Comes From God: Reflections On the Family Book

Really impressive how much he is able to say in 80pp.! After the text he has several appendices of sample prayers from various liturgical resources, endnotes (which I wish were footnotes), a thorough index, a timeline of developments and even a glossary of terms. WJK Press gave it a nice cover too.

Gives alot of pretty insightful reflection on Calvin. One example is typical: "[Calvin's] liturgy emboides theological inisghts that were important to him and to teh church in the midst of the Reformation conflicts, but under the pressure exerted by the crisi, some things have been exaggerated and other things neglected. The concern for UNDERSTANDING the liturgy leads to an oppressive didacticism that often persists even today, while Calvin's theology of the Holy Spirit seems hardly to have made an impression on his eucharistic liturgy....." (p. 72).

You get the picture -- real nuanced and rich.

The appendices remind me why I feel conflicted liturgically. I am so weary of most of the conservative church's disdain for liturgy. And I love how one segment of the mainline church's liberal wing has embraced liturgical renewal, and yet I hate the goofy, p.c. expressions of their actual newer mainline liturgies. For example, Byars' appendix G (pp. 101ff.) prints the Eucharistic Prayer K for the United Church of Canada. The gymnastics involved in not using male language for God are not only a-historical, they are just grating to the ear. They style the Lord's Prayer as "the Prayer of Jesus."