Joris Geldhof immediately lays out his “ambitious” threefold “goal” in the introduction. The book's title reflects the first part, making a case “that liturgy and secularisation do not mutually exclude each other” (2). Second, he offers what he calls “a deeper insight into the nature of the liturgy” (xiii). Finally, he desires to “continue interdisciplinary and ecumenical conversations about the liturgy” (xiv). He describes the two-part structure of the book as akin to a “diptych” depicting “two different but related mysteries” that must be contemplated together. Geldhof is “inspired by the double need to locate liturgy and the world in and through each other” (xv).

Although the book is a compilation of articles, presentations, and lectures written or delivered over a decade, they do form a coherent—though complex—whole in which the successive chapters build on one another, moving through the goals laid out in the introduction. Drawing on Charles Taylor and Louis Dupré, Geldhof argues that the problem of secularism and modernity is not “a conflict over knowledge” (37) but rather its “reductionism or exclusivism,” focusing only on matters of this world and “refus[ing] to see … ‘other dimensions’” (11). The author discusses a range of philosophical and anthropological theories in part 1, showing both the depth and breadth of his scholarship. This interdisciplinary work informs many of his analyses of the liturgy and its “strangeness”—as fundamentally different from but not opposed to the modern world (77)—as well as proposals for ways in which the “holiness” of the liturgy, which “unites and reconciles” is an antidote to ideology (74) and ways in which “the liturgy can play a proactive role in the encounter with (secular) culture” (125), discussed in part 2.

The author cautions against equating modernity with “any one of its particular forms,” accepting Dupré’s theory of waves within modernity and positing that postmodernity may be “merely a fourth wave from the same modern sea” (35). Others may differ on this matter. And those who embrace postmodernism, with its assumption that reality is a human construction and its rejection of universals, may find little of value in the book, for Geldhof clearly states, “I still hold on to a firm universalism when it comes to defending the significance of Christian liturgy and sacraments” (xviii). His notion of an ontological reality is central to his understanding of the liturgy, which participates the “transcendent” reality, the “dimension [that] guarantees the connection with the divine origin” (67).

For the Christian liturgical scholar and graduate student holding the same assumptions as Geldhof, there is much to commend in the book. By situating his theological reflection on the liturgy within and alongside of his interdisciplinary discussions of philosophy and anthropology, he makes legitimate his claim, following Taylor, that the core issue is not one of epistemology but rather “moral and existential factors” (37). Thus, although there will always be a tension between secularization and liturgy, and although it will be more difficult for the “modern” person to grasp the power of the liturgy, the malady facing humans today “is not primarily of an epistemological kind but of a soteriological nature…. Indeed, what is most profound is the very recognition of the need for grace and salvation” (69, emphasis in original). Having identified the problem, Geldhof sets aside the theories of anthropologists and phenomenologists about ritual, and instead explores the works of liturgical pioneers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to articulate that “deeper insight into the nature of the liturgy.” Some of these include his sharp distinction between ideologies, which are “fundamentally directed towards dominion,” (28) and the liturgy, which is “poetic rather than noetic” (41); his distinction between the (human) categories of sacred and profane and the “meta-sacredness” of the liturgy that comes from above; and his deep sacramentality as a corrective to the gnostic or “spiritualizing” tendency of secular society.

Although he writes from within his own Roman Catholic tradition, as a layperson, his deep connection to the liturgy from the standpoint of the pew and his exploration of liturgical scholars steeped in biblical imagery invites the kind of ecumenical conversation he hopes to generate.