"Glory be to..." is ever so much better than simply "Glory to..." - and "world without end" is indeed awesome! :)

Apparently not because, for instance, the ritual books of the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite approve both forms of the Glory be/Glory to.

I'm sorry, I wasn't implying "Glory be..." wasn't licit... just that it seems it would be somewhat hypocritical for me to advocate for literal translations, and then have my choir sing "Glory be..." instead of "Glory to..." because I can't defend the accuracy of the "Glory be..." translation compared to "Glory to..."

Maybe someone else here could?

I've also had questions about the phrase "world without end," because it does seem to be theologically incorrect. All of the other translations I've seen have phrases like "century after century" or something that indicates an incredibly long time. It would seem we already have a perfectly appropriate phrase, "forever and ever."

I asked a Priest about this a couple of years ago but he couldn't offer any explanation about why it's appropriate to use "world without end." Where does one go with questions like this?

What CHGiffen said.

My point was that, since Holy Mother Church says we can use "Glory be" in the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite, Holy Mother Church has apparently concluded that the figurative expression "world without end" isn't theologically problematic or incorrect.

To the extent someone is perplexed by the expression, the solution is to say, "It's a poetic way of saying, "forever and ever," the way, say, "Hide me in the shadow of your wings" a poetic way of saying, "Protect me," and not an assertion that God is a winged beast. The same response would be in order if, for example, someone said it was "theologically problematic" to say "through ages of ages" is because the word "age" means a finite, temporal period, whereas eternity is infinite and extra-temporal.

Unless it's changed, Glory Be, was the form of Gloria Patria in the British and Irish Liturgy of the Hours (rather than Glory to).

Just as in Slavonic: Slava Otsu... (no "to be"), but still translates as "Glory be to the Father"...

The Old English "weoruld", like the Latin "saecula", meant "a really long time". ("Weoruld" meant something like "a generation" or "the lifespan of a man", if I recall correctly, whereas "saecula" means more like "an age". But both were used similarly vaguely to mean whatever you felt like poeticking.)

Anyway, in the Gospels and elsewhere, Jesus is always talking about "this age" and "this generation". But He often does so in a way that makes it practically a synonym for "this world". This influenced the way "saecula" increasingly was used as a synonym for "this world". So when Old English Gospel translations used "weoruld" in these phrases, it also moved from being strictly a time phrase to being a time-and-space phrase.

The phrase "saecula saeculorum" (age of ages) implies that the ages do not cease -until the end of time-, or that there is a ceaseless (until the end) Mother of All Ages, an awesomely long time, being referred to. "Weoruld withouten ende" (or whichever spelling/pronunciation you use) was and is a perfectly reasonable translation of this dimension of perpetuity until the end of time. Even though "weoruld" is now "world", it still straddles space and time in its definition.

Some of this stuff is affected by Latin having a ton of different words for "forever" and "always" and "ceaselessly", each of which can have different implications as to whether the forever period has a beginning but no end; no beginning and no end; or a beginning and an end but no pauses in the middle. English doesn't really care too much about these fine distinctions. (Though they are important for theology, your English theologians were talking theology in Latin; so they didn't care much about them in English, either.)

(Anyway, if anybody thinks "world without end" means there's no end of time, that person hasn't been properly taught about the Four Last Things. This would never have been a problem in any generation before our own, because English religious literature and sermons, as well as popular devotional literature in English, have always been hugely interested in the Four Last Things. And if you really wanted an excruciatingly literal translation that includes everything that's implied, it should be something like "May there be glory given to", which would be annoying to sing or say. All this messing about with perfectly good translations is a sad mistake.)

Also note that from saecula comes "secular" which we now take to mean "worldly."

Sometime you have to remember what words used to mean.

I wrote a blog post about "And with your spirit" recently.
Someone commented that the phrase is meaningless in English.
Really? Because it sounds like it means that we are asking the Lord to be with the someone's spirit. I guess that's just me.

I do really like "unto ages of ages," though.