Local Worship, Global Church: Popular Religion and Liturgy. By Mark R. Francis. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2014. xii + 181 pp. $19.95 (paper).In his preface, author promises a particular perspective on relationship between liturgy and culture, offering a viewpoint from common sense of regular worshippers, rather than sorts of people who write historical treatises and theological discourses. Since he is one of those sorts of people, it is difficult to imagine his accomplishing this task. The book is written by a Roman Catholic, examining Roman Catholic liturgy, and presumably for Roman Catholics-yet when he speaks of liturgy as the principal and unchanging guarantor of unity of universal Church (p. 1), one cannot help but extrapolate to non-Catholic ecclesial bodies.He opens with a discussion of popular piety: processions, pilgrimages, rosaries, novenas, holy medals, scapulars, and special local customs and rites-something Second Vatican Council commended, provided that they harmonize with overall intent of liturgical prayer. Noting that demographic center of for Catholics, Anglicans, and Protestants is shifting from Europe and North America to Africa and South America, Francis asks how we can be sensitive to often unarticulated but nevertheless deeply held religious sensibilities of local congregations and indigenous contexts (p. 6). Asserting liturgy communicates on three levels-official, public, and personal-he discusses challenges of syncretism and hybridization, various worldviews, and interaction between popular religious impulses and official worship of institutional church.In second chapter, Francis provides a brief but compelling overview of cultural diversity among first Christians-differing nations, languages, races, and ethnic groups. This chapter emphasizes that worship of early Christians was more spontaneous and informal than it would become, and also more influenced by popular religious practices and local beliefs.The book continues with a summary of emerging Greco-Roman world and birth of classic Roman rite in fourth century. Francis notes that church gradually assumed role of moral arbiter of social order and guardian of Roman Empire, as language shifted from mostly Greek to mostly Latin. He then follows through what he calls Germanization of Christianity at dawn of scholasticism, and such oddities as ordeal of ingestion in which an accused was forced to eat specially exorcised and blessed bread and cheese; if he choked he was found guilty of theft. …