This informative and readable book, by Lutheran pastor and prolific liturgical scholar Frank C. Senn (PhD, Notre Dame), opens with a discussion of the nature of liturgy and the main periods of liturgical history, giving particular attention to the influence of culture. The chapter on the Liturgy of the Hours shows how the principal hours have been celebrated in different historical eras and Christian traditions, and explains the difference between the cathedral and monastic offices. Four chapters are devoted to the liturgical year, with much interesting information on the origins of seasons and feasts and their accompanying popular customs and traditions. Other sacraments are treated in a single chapter titled “Life Passages.” The final chapters address the liturgical arts and forms of participation in worship.

The longest chapter, “The Principal Order of Service,” includes a short history of the development of the eucharistic prayer and describes the common pattern that prayer has come to take in many traditions today, which is closely comparable to the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 79. Most of the chapter outlines the order of service of twenty-four historical forms of eucharistic liturgy, from the second to the twenty-first century, with a paragraph or two of commentary on each. The outlines reveal the elements of the different forms of worship, and while this is instructive and illuminating, getting the most out of the outlines requires a willingness to examine the orders of service line by line and something akin to the skill of a cook who can tell what a dish tastes like by reading the recipe. One quibble: the elements in the orders of service are simply listed sequentially, without highlighting the underlying form of the service. For the Missal of Paul VI, for example, we are given the various component parts of the Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist, and the introductory and concluding rites, but without indication of these four (two major, two subsidiary) structural units.

One strength of the book is its explicitly ecumenical scope—a helpful and even necessary component for courses focusing on Catholic liturgy and sacraments. Senn writes most frequently about the Roman and Lutheran traditions, but one learns as well about Anglicans and Anabaptists and many others in between. Not only differences but interesting similarities emerge. Those accustomed, for example, to think the era of rigid liturgical uniformity a particularly Catholic, post-Tridentine phenomenon will discover that “the post-Reformation period saw a legalistic standardization of liturgy in the various confessional traditions” (20), beginning (before Pius V) with the Anglican “Acts of Uniformity” enforcing use of the Book of Common Prayer.

Senn's approach is mainly historical and descriptive, but he attends to pastoral practice as well and offers occasional suggestions, such as how best to incorporate children in the community's liturgical worship (206–9). Each chapter provides titles “for further reading.” The book concludes with a chronology of liturgy-related events and documents, a useful glossary of liturgical terms, endnotes mostly and helpfully bibliographic, and an index. The book merits a place in university, seminary, and parish libraries and could be used with profit as a supplementary textbook in liturgy courses.