Book Recommendation

Pressure of work has decreased my blogging of late; but I have at least done some reading in the evenings and so forth.

Until I considered the matter yester-day and to-day when reading the newspapers, I hadn't realized how often I buy books online, and have them posted to me from far-flung corners of the globe...  The headlines I allude to refer to the bankruptcy of a large chain of bookshops, on the grounds that they are undercut by such sales.  Now, personally I buy online because the local bookshops are unlikely to stock remaindered copies of Dowden's The Scottish Communion Office of 1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), or even such a recent bestseller as Creation and Evolution: A Conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo (how remiss of them, I know), but it appears that my fellow Australians are doing the same when purchasing their own favourite reads; for the last remnants of protectionism here in free-trade Australia have maintained barriers to the commercial importation of cheap books, while not forbidding people buying in these cost-cutting items privately.  Adam Smith is proven right again.

May I recommend an example of such an overseas import?  Readers of this blog will perhaps enjoy Andrew Burnham's Heaven and Earth in Little Space: The Re-enchantment of Liturgy (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010).  This excellent summary of much restorationist liturgical thinking was completed in late 2009 and only published last year, and in the meanwhile its author, then still an Anglican bishop, has come into full communion with the Holy See and been ordained a Catholic priest in record time: long may he serve the new Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham!

It is well-known that he is engaged on implementing the "re-enchantment" of which he wrote, by greatly assisting in the preparation of the forthcoming liturgical books for use by the incoming Anglicans of the nascent Ordinariates.  God willing, I may soon enough join my local T.A.C. friends at Mass, united in one communion at one altar, employing such a rite, once the Australian Ordinariate is established.