The 
UCA national Worship Working Group (of which I'm a member, but that's another story) has a good practice of rading and discussing a book together. We've just come to the end of "The Worship Mall" by Bryan Spinks who teaches at Yale University. I'm sure that he's excellent in his field (for example, I'd be very interested to read his book on the development of early baptismal liturgies), but this book has annoyed me in many ways, not the least of which is the chapter on alternative worship, which is just plain wrong on both detail and analysis in so many ways. (I haven't heard what jonny baker thinks of his coverage...)
One of the later chapters on Celtic worship is annoying to the extent that it mainly examines whether what people claim as Celtic worship todays is actually rooted in historic Celtic practice. While I understand that this is of interest to a liturgical scholar (and find his comment that much of the recent stuff is more "postmodern Celtish" rather funny and true), he's missed a great opportunity to look more deeply at why and how this is currently appealing. To be fair, he does make comments about that, but mainly in terms of romanticism (a great quote from Tolkien though, about the Celts being like a grab-bag of magic to draw from).
On the plus side, he referred to "Celtic Daily Prayer" from the Northumbria Community. This arrived in the mail today (no coincidence, I ordered it...). It's a substantial 800 page resource with Daily Office, Complines, a month of daily meditations, Communion liturgies, a Family shabbat, saints and festival calendars, notes of some particular saints, resources for rites of passage, times ans seasons, blessings, daily readings for two years. To be honest, I don't even know the history of the community. It just sounded like a worthwhile resource. From my initial scan it looks brilliant.
I now have to go back to my other few Celtic prayer books and work out whether Spinks thinks they'd be the real deal or just more contemporary rubbish that people seem to find helpful...
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