The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood By AnnaStrhan, Stephen G.Parker, Susan B.Ridgely (eds.). New York: Bloomsbury, 2017 ISBN 978 1 4742 5109 0, 393 pp, £90.00

Abstract

The front cover of The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood has a black-and-white photograph of some school children, a nun and a skipping rope. When my 12-year-old son saw this on my desk, he asked ‘is that nun whipping or playing with those children?’ In many ways his sense that there could be multiple interpretations of the cover image reflects the inherent complexities which make the study of religion and childhood so fascinating. Moreover, his reaction indicates that, scholars aside, children themselves are challenged by the ambiguities presented by the religious worlds around them. The point of a reader, presumably, is to bring dispersed material together not merely into the convenience of closer proximity, but also to reveal relationships (both friendly and conflictual) between the sources. As Strhan, Parker and Ridgely make clear, because intellectual considerations of religion and childhood have been around for two millennia or more, this field is highly fragmented across time and disciplines. So their project is a very helpful way to display and address this fragmentation, and presents an impressively rich landscape of work. In fact, a leitmotif shared across so many of the articles is the resistance to, or impossibility of, ‘sorting out’ childhood and religion questions: contradictions and tensions are as important within the best pieces of scholarship here, as evident between them. Faced with such a widespread and diversely focused field, the editors have selected both excerpts from classic and existing material as well as commissioned new chapters, and then organised the 45 contributions into five sophisticated themes. These cover (i) diverse religious conceptualisations of childhood, (ii) understandings of childhood ‘piety’ and its nurturing contexts, (iii) religious education and rights, (iv) media and literature, and (v) issues of religious discipline and children's agency. This thematic organisation makes for some wonderfully unlikely bedfellows showcasing the editors' skill in drawing attention to shared points of debate across centuries, as well as between (even within) religious traditions. Readers would be strongly advised to pay close attention to the well-argued introduction, and the brief introductions to the five thematic sections as this system is one of the best things about the reader, providing an original and effective way to corral outwardly very different scholarship (e.g. Rousseau on infancy, Qur'anic schooling in Nigeria, a Rabbinic perspective from the 1900s, contemporary experiences of Jewish school children). The success of mixing excerpted existing sources and commissioned chapters is uneven. The scope covered is excellent — diverse religions, methods and disciplinary perspectives, so that even those already working in the field are likely to find many new voices and foci in a reading tour which takes in child labour in Brazil, New Age conceptions of childhood, ethnography of Hasidic girls, Islamic response to child soldiers as well as subtle textural differences within a single context. However, in making excerpts from existing work, in some cases these were often noticeably shorter and chopped up, affording less representation of that author's position, and possibly a rather skewed impression (e.g. the Berryman and Kincaid excerpts). In some cases, the (too) brief introductions to these excerpts promised coverage of ideas which the passage did not in fact contain (e.g. Froebel on play, Archibald's position on Christian Education). And there were some notable ‘classic’ voices, such as Fowler and Winnicott, who might have been allowed to speak for themselves, rather than have their theoretical concepts reproduced in such a condensed form that new readers, such as students, might find baffling. The index also has surprising omissions: ‘play’ is a recurring topic, arising in every section yet has no entry. This book's undoubted success is its demonstration of the many ways which religion and childhood provides sophisticated questions about almost every aspect of childhood studies. The religious field offers a particularly sharp focus on matters of adult–child relations, and represents one of the most enduring sources of diverse conceptualisations of childhood across time and culture. The volume also highlights how incisive multidisciplinary analysis can provide insights for pressing contemporary issues, such as child sexual abuse, migration and radicalisation, in other words, a field crucial as much for its scholarly interest as practice and policy. In conclusion, The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood shows that the eternally contested issues of ‘what a child is’ and ‘what religion is’ create a highly reactive compound which is very compelling to read about, and fertile for further scholarship.