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In conclusion, I recommend the Irene Gold review seminars. They may help more than this book will. It is a great book, but let's be real here, with the expense of Part IV National Boards ($850), it is cheaper not to buy this book and go to a review and get a passing grade, than to save in the beginning and fail the exam. That's the opinion of someone who used this book and studied in detail and failed the first time around.
4 Stars!
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If you're a Roman Catholic, you will find in the Oxford Book of Prayer examples of liturgical language that are lovelier than any of the passages you have heard at a post-conciliar Mass. For the Anglicans, there is Hooker and Traherne and Herbert of the earlier centuries, and Eric Milner-White, John Baillie, and Appleton himself for the twentieth century. Orthodoxy is very well represented, with Eucharistic prayers, with anthems and hymns for vespers and mattins at various points in the liturgical year.
There is Cardinal Langton's immortal "Veni Sancte Spiritus" in both Latin and English. There are a few poems, or snippets of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. There are canticles by Alcuin of York, and prayers of Ghanaian fishermen, in happy juxtaposition. There is a litany to the Holy Spirit (prayer no. 672) used by the ecumenical Taize community in France.
There is a moderately sized section of prayers from "other traditions of faith," from Jewish to Taoist, Muslim to Baha'i, a gracious but not overly concessive tribute to religious pluralism (a prayer-book consisting solely of Christian prayers would perhaps be seen as triumphalistic), but there, some beauty and genuine feeling for the transcendent is often to be found.
As there are more than eleven hundred prayers in this admirably capacious anthology, any review of a few paragraphs is bound to fail in its attempt to convey the temper and the flavour of the book. Let us therefore take one prayer at not-quite-random, no. 588, from the Syrian Orthodox Church:
"Open to us, Lord, your great door; O Fountain of all mercy, hear our prayer and save our souls. Shine upon me, Lord, and I shall be light like the day; I will sing your praise in light while I marvel; may the morning awaken me to the praise of your Godhead and I will pursue the study of your word all the day long. With the day may your light shine on our thoughts and may it drive away the shadows of error from our souls. The creation is full of light, give light also to our hearts that they may praise you with the day and the night."
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