This new release is not simply a reprint of the previous 1995 edition however, but rather an expanded and updated edition which brings it up to the era of Benedict XVI and the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. In that regard, this book will most certainly be of interest even to those who already own the previous edition. That edition was difficult enough to find in its own right -- of this I speak from experience -- and thus another benefit of this release is that it makes the text available to a wider audience.
Dr. Sheridan Gilley of Durham University had this to say about The Banished Heart:
"This book is an eloquently written, passionate and scholarly account of the secularisation and desacralisation of the Roman Catholic liturgy from the 1960s... The impoverishment of the liturgy through the sacrifice of two thousand years of symbolism, and the loss of the dimension of mystery in the name of didacticism and man-centredness, are also strikingly described as rooted in a reaction against the defects and rigidities of an overcentralised and authoritarian pre-Vatican II Catholicism... Far from being a simply reactionary work, appealing to an imaginary golden age before the 1960s, this book is an historically-informed challenge to restore the very God-centred character of the liturgy itself."
The book will be available from Continuum for $34.95 USD. For more information, including a table of contents, see the Continuum website.
