Today's religious preaching, a subject declared "a misery" and "in a state of crisis" by Church commentators, here comes under the close analysis of one of her distinguished spokesmen. Father Grasso pinpoints both its obvious and obscure faults while projecting a new direction for more effective preaching. Contemporary preaching, he says, continues to rotate around the anchor of devotion, clinging to shop-worn themes and unmindful of its role as a form of communication. On earth God and man must meet through the mediation of the human word. Father Grasso thus sets preaching in proper perspective as a necessary function in the divine plan of salvation. The author's objections to today's homiletics are specific: it is too abstract and unreal, fragmentary and lacking in sincerity; its character is mainly moralistic. The preacher's words, like anachronisms, are bloodless and life-less; they leave the hearer co1d.