Childhood Studies, Hermeneutics, and Theological Ethics

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to ask how, both methodologically and substantively, theological ethics should engage today in childhood studies. More specifically, since there is now emerging an international interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, primarily in the social sciences, I ask both how theological ethics may contribute toward this broader field and how this field may in turn influence theological ethics. My argument is that, in an analogous way to women’s and environmental studies, childhood studies should not only apply existing theological methods and norms but also challenge and transform them. It should do so in new and distinctive ways. In analogy to terms like feminism and environmentalism I call this approach “childism.” Christian ethics in particular has a long history of this kind of child-centered selfreflection: such as Jesus’s placing a child “in the midst” of his disciples to explain the kingdom of heaven, the early church fathers using childhood to describe the ideal human image of God, Augustine’s beginning his groundbreaking Confessions through his original sin in infancy and youth, and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s exploration of the “feeling of absolute dependence” in relation to the notion of the child as gift. The difference today is both a changed situation for children around the world and the possibility for greater empirical sophistication about the nature of childhood and its relations to families and society. The question for theological ethics is how to respond to the complex lives of children in the contemporary world in as sufficiently attentive and