Dr Anna Strhan, Lecturer in Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies has co-edited a new book The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood (Bloomsbury, 2017) with Stephen Parker (University of Worcester) and Susan Ridgely (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA).

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 addresses the wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective.

Divided into five thematic parts, it 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.

The book includes chapters by other Kent academics, including Professor Jeremy Carrette, Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Culture in the Department of Philosophy, entitled ‘Religious Minds: The Psychology of Religion and Childhood’ and Professor Gordon Lynch, Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology in the Department of Religious Studies, entitled ‘Historical Abuse, trauma and public acts of moral repair’, as well as Anna’s chapter on ‘Children in Contemporary British Evangelicalism’.

For full details of the book, please see the publisher’s page.