From recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as placeholders for the future. Childhood has often been a particular site of struggle for negotiating the location of religion in public and everyday social life, and children’s involvement and non-involvement in religion raises strong feelings because they represent the future of religious and secular communities, even of society itself. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood provides a rich resource for students and scholars of this interdisciplinary field, and addresses wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective.
Divided into five thematic parts, the volume provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine’s description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children’s literature, religious education, and Qur’anic schools.
- Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa
- An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors
- Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book’s webpage
Acknowledgements Permissions Details Introduction, Anna Strhan, Stephen G. Parker, Susan Ridgely Part One: What is Childhood? Theoretical Pespectives Introduction 1. From Infancy to Childhood, Augustine 2. A Religion for Children, Philippe Ariès 3. Erotic Innocence, James Kincaid 4. The Hindu Tradition and Childhood: An Overview, Eleanor Nesbitt 5. Children as Stepping Stones, Children as Heroes: Contrasting Two Buddhist Narratives, Vanessa R. Sasson 6. Children in Contemporary British Evangelicalism, Anna Strhan 7. The New Age Movement and the Definition of the Child, Beth Singler 8. Thinking and Its Application to Religion, Ronald Goldman 9. Religious Minds: The Psychology of Religion and Childhood, Jeremy Carrette Part Two: Changing Ideas and Spaces of Childhood Piety: The Secularization, Resacralization, and Reinvention of Childhood Introduction 10. The Domestic Context of Child Rearing in Reformed Christianity, Richard Baxter 11. On Discipline, Praise and Parental Authority, John Locke 12. The Basis of Religious Education, Friedrich Froebel 13. The Modern Sunday School, George Hamilton Archibald 14. The Religious Potential of the Child, Sofia Cavalletti 15. Godly Play, Jerome Berryman 16. God Talk with Young Children, John Hull 17. Learning to be a Muslim, Jonathan Scourfield, Sophie Gilliat-Ray, Asma Khan and Sameh Otri 18. Becoming Muslim in a Danish provincial town, Marianne Holm Pedersen 19. Faith Co-Creation in U.S. Catholic Churches: How First Communicants and Faith Formation Teachers Shape Catholic Identity, Susan Ridgely Part Three: Religion, Education and Citizenship Introduction 20. Education, Discipline, ad Freedom, Immanuel Kant 21. The New-born Child, Jean-Jacques Rousseau 22. The Religious Training of Children Among the Jews, Rabbi A. A. Green 23. Ambiguous adventures: Traditional Qur’anic students in northern Nigeria, Hannah Hoechner 24. Passive, voiceless victims or actively seeking a religious education? Qur’anic school students in Senegal, Anneke Newman 25. Children's right to religion in educational perspective, Friedrich Schweitzer 26. Childhood, Faith and the Future: religious education and ‘national character’ in the Second World War, Stephen G. Parker and Rob Freathy 27. ‘A new sense of God’: British Quakers, citizenship and the adolescent girl, Sian Roberts 28. ‘When we get out of here…’: Danish free schools, religious children and societies of peers, Sally Anderson Part Four: Media and the Materialities of Childhood Religion Introduction 29. The Child’s First Steps in Religion, John G. Williams 30. A World of Their Own Making, John R. Gillis 31. ‘No Matter how Small’: The Democratic Imagination of Dr. Seuss, Henry Jenkins 32. ‘Making disciples of the young’: Children’s Literature and Religion, Pat Pinsent 33. Golems and Goblins: The Monstrous in Jewish Children’s Literature, Jodi Eichler-Levine 34. Childhood, Imagination, Consecration: Romantic Christianity in C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, Naomi Wood 35. The BBC’s Religious Service for Schools, ‘Come and Praise’, and the musical aesthetic and religious discourse around the child, Stephen G. Parker 36. The Construction of Religion and Childhood in Broadcast Worship, Rachael Shillitoe 37. Children, Toys and Judaism, Laura Arnold Leibman 38. Classrooms as spaces of religious and moral education and socialization, Stephen G. Parker Part Five: Religious Discipline and the Agency and Domination of Childhood Introduction 39. Historical Abuse, trauma and public acts of moral repair, Gordon Lynch 40. Child Soldiers and the Militarization of Children: A Muslim Ethical Response to the Situation in the Sudan, Zayn Kassam 41. Understanding Childhood: Child Sex Abuse and the Roman Catholic Church, Susie Donnelly 42. A Crisis about the Theology of Children, Robert A. Orsi 43. The Child’s Right to Religion in International Law, Rachel Taylor 44. Child labour and Moral Discourse in Brazil, Maya Mayblin 45. Mitzvah Girls, Ayala Fader Author Index Subject Index
Anna Strhan is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent, UK Stephen Parker is Professor of the History of Religion and Education at the University of Worcester, UK Susan Ridgely is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Reviews for The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood
This book is the carefully-prepared, richly-outfitted herald of a whole new field of study. It which will change the way we look at religion, children, our societies and ourselves. * Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion, Lancaster University, UK * Bringing together a range of classic and contemporary work into a coherent and well-structured format, The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood is an essential text for students and researchers alike. Its substantive breadth and intellectual depth provide much needed consolidation for this important but often neglected field of study. * Peter Hemming, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK * An excellent collection of primary sources with commentary [that] fills an important gap between texts about RE pedagogy and scholarly studies of religion. * David Lundie, University of St Mark & St John, UK *
