Published in 1982, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style is a classic and practical study guide for Catholic priests and ministers of other faiths on how to celebrate the liturgy effectively. In it, the author maintains that "the liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught."

He looks not beyond rubrics but deep into their historical and pastoral existence in order to develop rules of style that articulate this existence in current Roman Catholic liturgical usage.

The author, Benedictine Father Aidan Kavanagh, was a noted liturgical theologian from the Abbey of St. Meinrad in Indiana and a professor of liturgy at the Yale Divinity School. He wrote several influential books, including On Liturgical Theology, in which he argued the importance of liturgy as the church's "primordial" theology. Father Kavanagh passed away in July 2006.

ISBN 0-8146-6054-1 [122 pp, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, softcover]