There is a steady supply of prayer books, but the new one by Thomas Oden and Cindy Crosby, Ancient Christian Devotional, is unique. If you’d like to draw deeply on Orthodoxy’s rich heritage, this is the book for you. Here’s what we get daily and there is one chapter for each week of the church calendar — 52 exercises in all:
First, the book is structured by the Church calendar, beginning with Advent.
Second, each exercise explains the theme, gives an opening prayer according to the church calendar, then we get an OT reading with reflections from the Church Fathers, a Psalm of Response to the OT reading with some Church Father reflections, then a New Testament reading with more responses from the fathers, a Gospel reading with more from the fathers, and then finally a closing prayer.
All you need is a Bible and you’ve got a good prayer book steeped in the patristics.