Of Prayer Books - Guardian Angel Prayer Bookby Josephus Flavius

Thanks to our good friend Joseph Flavius at Byzantine Texas for his recent review of the Guardian Angel Prayer Book and permission to include it here.

Joyfully surprised by the Guardian Angel Prayer Book

A few weeks back I ordered two prayer books from the new ACROD bookstore, Orthodox Goods. The online store is a new enterprise for the Christ the Saviour Seminary and it looks like they will continue to add new items as time passes. In search of a good, pocket-sized prayer book (I suggest the Potamitis Publishing "My Prayer Book" for a larger equivalent) I ordered the Guardian Angel Children's Prayer Book and expected to see a book of prayers with occasional colorful pictures to entertain the eye.

What I received instead was much more than that. On durable yet flexible picture-book quality paper the majority of the book is actually a walk-through of the Divine Liturgy. It presents pictures, short explanations, and prayers in a way that a child could hold the book and follow along quite easily. The last third of the book (again, beautifully illustrated) is a compendium of prayers in a child-readable, large font along with a short listing of greetings based on the time of year (e.g. 'Christ is Risen!' 'Christ is Born!').

I plan to use this book both at home and at church this weekend as an aid for understanding the Faith. It should come in quite handy when a child's mind wanders so I pass down the book and ask him, "Find where we are in the liturgy."

As I mentioned a few months back a lot of emails I receive are requests for help finding a good online religious items retailer. Next week I'm going to list a number of them I have ordered from along with a rating system and anecdotal notes.

As an additional endorsement, we gave our daughter a copy of this delightful prayer book when she was little and it was her constant companion every time we went to church.