Annemie Dillen and Didier Pollefeyt (eds.), Children's Voices: Children's Perspectives in Ethics, Theology and Religious Education (Peeters, 2010), 450pp
Timothy P. Jackson (ed.), The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right (Eerdmans, 2011), 386pp
Since the publication of The Child in Christian Thought in 2001, there has been increasing number of studies around children and theology - see my list here. The interest does not appear to be coming to an end anytime soon. As well as the two books being briefly reviewed here, there is another edited title by Marcia Bunge appearing in 2012: Children, Adults and Shared Responsibilities, and the promise of more on their way.
Children's Voices and The Best Love of the Child add two more collections of essays that explore the child. The former focuses on questions of spirituality, ethics and family. Bonnie Miller-McLemore's essay opens the book and provides a fascinating and challenging study of spirituality and its relationship to children. She is critical of faith development theory and an over emphasis on the inner spiritual life, which tends to marginalize children. Instead she argues in conversation with the likes of Jerome Berryman's Godly Play for a spirituality that is more attentive to and inclusive of children. Marcia Bunge explores the question of vocation in relation to children and parents (a similar essay can be found in The Best Love of the Child). Bunge argues for a recovery of vocation for both children and parents and sets out a number of programmatic theses towards practical theology of vocation (a larger book length treatment is in the pipeline). Other papers focus on commercialization and childhood, the idolarty of children, theological ethics from the perspective of the child (this is by John Walls who has subsequently published Ethics in the Light of Childhood), and catechism and children, amongst others. This is a broad set of essays which values children and wants to take their voice seriously.
The Best Love of the Child brings together a number of disciplines - the book has four parts: social-psychological perspectives; historical perspectives; philosophical and theological perspectives; and legal perspectives - to argue that in all the conversation about the rights of children, that at the centre is the right to be loved and the right to be taught how to love others. The focus is largely on the home and the role of parents and in response children in being loved and taught to love.
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