It also has an intro for each week so you know beforehand what mass is about. It also has a little background for each reading so you can make sense of what they are really trying to say. It does not have the songs.

The church rotates the mass every year, so there are four sections to the book. All you have to do is look up in the front of the book what year/date you are currently in and find that page to go from there. I never leave this book behind on Sundays. I'm in my 20s and it's very easy to read and follow along.

Participating as a Deacon at the Liturgy can very easily become a matter of routine, mere ritual. One must spiritually "pinch" oneself periodically to bring about a renewed sense of the importance of this, the Catholic's central act of worship. This particular book is just that; a spiritual shot in the arm to renew one's faith and love in our most beloved treasure, the Eucharistic Liturgy.

A NEW SONG FOR THE LORD is far more than just about song at the Liturgy. There's Scripture, History, Theology. This group of collected essays builds a fundamental basis for the Liturgy itself as the book's sub-title suggests, "Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today." We must once again refocus our liturgical attention upon that to which it belongs: Jesus / God / Adoration. Cardinal Ratzinger points out the danger of the congregation focusing upon itself, of the community celebrating itself and thereby becoming a vehicle for merely social purposes.

We get the "Song" right when we have gotten the fundamentals of the Liturgy right. We thereupon can join with the angels in a most beautiful act of worship on that special day called the "Lord's." We've been prepared for it because already the Cardinal has given us a renewed appreciation for that day of days: the "third," the "first," the "eighth."

In contrast to some of the other of Cardinal Ratzinger's books, this one is a fairly easy read. Anyone seriously interested in the Mass and its attendant liturgy should find this book a most valuable encouragement that the Church truly does understand itself and its worship. Liturgists and church musicians alike should make available a special spot on their book shelf for this important, little tome. In fact, every Catholic should find in A NEW SONG FOR THE LORD a valuable source of rejuvenation and edification.

I give this one a five star rating for everyone.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the LDS (Mormon) Church, settled in what is now the State of Utah, authorized and encouraged men to take multiple wives. This was based on a belief that such marriages were the will of God. The practice led to intense opposition by the US government, causing the LDS Church to officially abandon this position in 1890. Some church members, convinced that plural marriage was correct and the official church leadership had fallen from the true path, separated and formed their own churches where the practice of plural marriage continued. Such practitioners are automatically excommunicated by the official LDS Church. Plural marriage is actually a criminal offense in Utah, but the state has not actively prosecuted it for several decades. The last major organized police raid on one of these churches occurred in the 1950s.

Beginning in the 1970s Joseph Ginat, then a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Utah, began building contacts with these Mormon fundamentalists, estimated to number between 20,000 and 60,000. This was a slow and delicate process because of the long history of oppression. Practitioners of plural marriage are still subject to various forms of discrimination so tend to be secretive. For this reason, it is effectively impossible to gather reliable statistics on these people, so any numbers quoted should be taken as very approximate.

Members of the Mormon fundamentalist churches share a belief in the patriarchal authority and duties of the husband, traditional gender roles, and having lots of kids. About 20% of their families are plural marriages. There are two main fundamentalist churches: one in a rural area on the Utah-Arizona border, and another in urban Salt Lake County. There are also a number of smaller groups and independent families. The rural church is more conservative than the urban church. A few radical or outspoken groups get most of the media attention, but the majority of fundamentalists are very quiet.

Drs. Altman and Ginat studied 26 Mormon fundamentalist plural marriage families by interviewing them in their homes and other locations. Most of those interviewed had been born or raised within the fundamentalist movement. This book is a report of what the authors learned about those families, with some comparisons to other societies with similar practices.

A fundamentalist Mormon plural marriage includes one husband and two or more wives. This is commonly called "polygamy" but is more correctly polygyny, since there are no plural marriages with more than one husband. About 2/3 of plural marriages are one husband and two wives. Frequently two or more wives are sisters. Most plural marriage families are in the middle to lower-middle socioeconomic class, with few members holding professional or managerial jobs. The combination of large numbers of children, middling job skills and the necessity of avoiding persecution places a great strain on the financial resources of many such families.

The addition of a wife to a family ideally occurs with the approval of the new wife's parents, the existing wife or wives in the family, and relevant church leaders. In the rural group, however, some marriages are arranged by the church leaders, perhaps to provide for a widow. In some cases, the addition of a wife is initiated by women who want to become family and so persuade the husband to go along. Failure to achieve consensus before a marriage can produce family turmoil, perhaps leading to divorce.

Weddings are generally officiated by church leaders, and are marriages between the husband and the individual wife. The other wives in a family may take part in the ceremony, but they are not considered to be directly wed to the new wife.

Each wife has a strong bond with her husband, while bonds between the wives are generally weaker. Most wives give each other mutual support, but some have conflicted relationships. The husband is expected to be fair and treat each wife equally; failure to do so sometimes leads to counseling by church leaders or even divorce. Often family members turn to their religious faith to sustain them through periods of family conflict. There is an expectation that the husband's patriarchal authority can be used to settle disagreements that can't be negotiated.

Normally, each wife has her own living space, whether a room or an entire house, where she is sovereign. In some cases two or more wives share a house but have their own rooms. The husband generally rotates among these homes by some arrangement, with the rotation system varying between families. Most husbands have little or no space of their own.

Child care practices vary between families. Most expect each child's mother to have primary responsibility for raising the child, but the actual work is frequently shared among wives in ways that adapt to changing circumstances. Many families house teenagers in shared rooms segregated by sex, with younger children kept closer to their mother. In most families the father has substantially less involvment with his children than does the mother.

Most husbands celebrate the anniversary of their marriage to each wife, generally by doing something special and personal with her. Relatively few holidays bring the entire family together for a celebration; in the largest families, this would be a major undertaking. Common family celebrations are Thanksgiving, Christmas and father's birthday. Several fundamentalist families decline to celebrate Christmas on the grounds that it has become too commercial.

Most plural wives must work, apparently out of economic necessity. A few have their own businesses. Although the husband is the nominal patriarch, most plural wives see less of their husband than a monogamous wife would and most are therefore independent and self-reliant. However, the husband is expected to be there when needed.

Both researchers are male, and most of the interviews were arranged through husbands. In fact, men were in practical control of the interview process with a few minor exceptions. It is interesting to speculate on what might come out if women were to interview plural wives in the absence of any men.

The HELP book series contains a broad range of activities. They are great filler material for current curriculum or better yet, use them as my teachers did to create your own meetings, classes and retreats. There is plenty of commentary and advice on creating prayer and community in each book.

Even the most experienced among us will probably find some surprises as they read along. In the "Prayer" book we found the creative and inexpensive "God Can" prayer which was a fine closing service where we could use all those empty aluminum cans we had collected after lunch at a recent retreat. And for my older teens I will be using the "Post Card Journals" found in the same book.

Jung and Coray are doing the Catholic Church, and wider society, a great service by attempting to open up theological discussion on the Church's teachings of homosexuality and human sexuality in general. The authors make the argument that Catholic teachings must not rely only on one particular reading of Scripture and tradition. Instead, the teachings must also take into account historical context of the times in which Scripture was written, current knowledge of the biological and social sciences, and life experiences that witness to the way God's Spirit is present in people's sexuality today. Jung and Coray and the other contributors to this book--most of whom are theologians associated with Chicago's Loyola University--thus provide a wide range of perspectives and much food for thought around the challenging topics addressed.

As a gay man raised in the Catholic tradition, this reviewer has had cause to question the Church's current teachings on human sexuality--for example, that marital sexual intercourse must always be open to the possibility of procreation, or that while a homosexual sexual orientation is not sinful, for two persons of the same sex to express love through sexual intimacy is sinful. Many of the authors in this collection raise similar questions about these teachings. The conclusion drawn by most of the essayists is that while there is certainly much truth and beauty to be found in the Church's sexual teachings, those teachings are at present based on an incomplete and sometimes inaccurate understanding of the full range of human experience.

One sincerely hopes that "Sexual Diversity and Catholicism" will be widely read and discussed among not just Catholics but anyone hoping to gain a better understanding of the many and diverse ways God's love is expressed through the beautiful gift of human sexuality.