This book will help us to live with and care for children with greater understanding, compassion, and respect.
Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective
Explore what faithful parenting might look like today
In Let the Children Come, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore explores the question, What does faithful parenting look like today? As she addresses this query, she updates outmoded and distorted assumptions about and conceptions of children in popular US culture. She also shows important insights and contributions religious traditions and communities, Christianity in particular, make as we examine how to regard and treat children well.
Miller-McLemore draws on historical and contemporary understandings of Christianity, psychology, and feminism to push back against negative trends, such as the narcissistic use of children for adult benefit, the market use of children to sell products, and the failure to give children meaningful roles in the domestic work of the family and the life of wider society.
Miller-McLemore views children as full participants in families and religious communities and as human beings deserving of greater respect and understanding than people typically grant them. In particular, the book rethinks five ways adults have viewed (and misperceived) children--as victims, sinful, gifts, work (the labor of love), and agents.
Reimagining children, she proposes, will lead to a renewed conception of the care of children as a religious practice.
- Publisher Fortress Press
- Format Paperback
- ISBN 9781506454573
- eBook ISBN 9781506454580
- Dimensions 6 x 9
- Pages 272
- Publication Date January 1, 2019
Endorsements
Dorothy C. Bass, editor of Practicing Our Faith
A positive, practical theology of children and child raising
In this appealing book, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore rescues the traditional themes of Christian theology for a positive, practical theology of children and child raising.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley>
Let the Children Come blends the best insights of sources once thought to be incompatible
Let the Children Come blends the best insights of sources once thought to be incompatible—the Christian tradition, feminism, and the modern social sciences—all deliciously mixed with Miller-McLemore’s own personal experience of raising children.
Don Browning, Divinity School, University of Chicago, author of Marriage and Modernization
Sure to provoke and sustain a conversation between secular and religious mothers
Let the Children Come is sure to provoke and sustain a conversation between secular and religious mothers that is at once enjoyable and necessary in our culture.
Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking toward a Politics of Peace
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore offers a compelling rethinking of children’s lives in Christian settings.
Miller-McLemore has written a timely book on a subject of great urgency. Drawing on feminist psychology, cultural criticism, religious history—and on her own experience as a parent—Miller-McLemore offers a compelling rethinking of children’s lives in Christian settings.
Robert A. Orsi, Harvard University
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore both challenges and empowers us for the task of caring for the children.
In lucid, insightful prose, the author both challenges and empowers us for the task of caring for the children of our shared blessing and responsibility. Courageous and illuminating.
James W. Fowler, The Center for Ethics, Emory University
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Author's Note
1. Depraved, Innocent, or Knowing
2. Popular Psychology
3. Christian Faith
4. Christian Faith
5. Feminism and Faith: Children as the Labor of Love
6. Feminism and Faith: Children as agents
Epilogue: Care of Children as a Religious Discipline and Community Practice
Thinking About Children and Faith
References
Acknowledgements
The Author
Index