Jan Schnell picks up the thread in the formative period of the late Middle Ages and early modernity, the era of the Reformation. She surveys the ways in which Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Jean Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and John Knox, among others, brought about substantial adaptations to the traditional liturgies they had inherited from Catholicism, and what motivated them theologically to do so.

Melanie C. Ross presents the various shapes of Christian liturgies that emerged in non-mainstream Protestant churches, including Quakerism, Anabaptism, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and Evangelicalism. Despite the prejudice that these traditions are non-liturgical, she demonstrates the profound theological and spiritual depth of their worship services.

Cas Wepener argues that there is a closer connection between liturgics and homiletics than one usually assumes. The proclamation of the Word has always been a crucial part of the Church’s liturgical services, but, maybe more significantly, it continues to co-shape the contexts in which its relevance can be shown and lived.

While the previous chapters paid attention to the Christian West, Alexander Alexopoulos introduces the wealth, beauty, and variety of Eastern Christian traditions. They comprise not only immensely diverse geographical areas, from Armenia to Ethiopia and from Lebanon to India, but also intriguing histories and denominational differences.

Liborius Olaf Lumma sheds light on the Church’s daily prayer, previously called the Divine Office in the West, now known as the Liturgy of the Hours. He sketches their emergence and historical development in different cultural realms, but not without sounding how intrinsically important the hours are for Christian worship as a whole.

Gilles Drouin goes through the history of church architecture and identifies some profound shifts with far-reaching liturgical, theological, and pastoral implications. He concludes that churches today need above all to be hospitable places that further the always renewing encounter between God and humankind.

Thomas Pott takes as a point of departure the gospel’s unmistakable call for the unity of the Body of Christ. This leads him to reflect on several issues over which there is division in the Church. However, none of these issues is capable of endangering the fact that the liturgy bears, manifests, and transmits ecclesial unity uniquely and fundamentally.

Patrick Prétot comments on the individual parts of which the celebration of the Eucharist consists. For that, he takes as his point of departure the script of the Order of Mass, which is used in the Roman Catholic Church but which shows many commonalities with other liturgical and ecclesial traditions.

Focusing on the often too easily neglected concept of piety, Job Getcha sheds light on the natural bond between liturgy and spirituality. It would be erroneous to see them simply as the objective or communal and subjective or individual sides of the same reality, since an argument can be set up that spirituality itself is as liturgical as the liturgy is spiritual.

Juliette J. Day explores the profound meaning that texts have for liturgy. It is crucial, however, that texts are not considered as a narrow or equivocal category. To the contrary, texts provide an extraordinarily rich palette of genres, languages, and discourses, each of which deserves respect in its own right and which, moreover, has always to be seen in context.

The relevance of Christian liturgy can hardly be underestimated. Christians are present in most of the world’s cultures and societies today. Sometimes they are only tiny minorities. Sometimes these minorities are well respected, but the opposite can be equally true. Sometimes they are suppressed and even persecuted. In other cases Christians occupy a majority position, which enables them to celebrate and live their faith in the public realm. This position, which can but may not necessarily go back several centuries, also allows them to be in power and to staff the decision-making bodies at many levels of socio-economic and political life. Still other historical circumstances cause Christians to look back on an influential past and a lost impact. This often results in a fragmented situation with an uncertain outcome, which obviously comes with many challenges, not least for Christians themselves. This scenario is particularly the case in so-called secular cultures, characterized by sometimes dramatically rapid processes of pluralization and detraditionalization.

Bridget Nichols shows how important the bodily dimension of the liturgy is, especially because it is steadily associated with mental and cognitive activities. In this context, she pays particular attention to the role of the senses, which impacts greatly how not only big celebrations and ceremonies but also small gestures are experienced.

Joris Geldhof covers important elements of the liturgy’s evolution in the European Middle Ages, arguing that this concept itself is misleading with respect to what really happened. Both the liturgical rites and their theological and spiritual interpretations went through fascinating developments.