Project focuses worldwide attention on children

Fri, May 9, 2008
There is growing concern around the world for children and society’s obligations to them, says the director of Valparaiso University’s Project on The Child in Religion and Ethics. Valparaiso’s project – a four-year initiative funded with a $538,000 grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. – has directly addressed challenges facing children today and contributed in a number of ways to burgeoning academic and political debates about children and their well-being both in the United States and abroad.

“The tremendous needs of children today as well as political tensions, international conflict and even environmental concerns are all prompting more people to ponder the future of our planet,” says director Dr. Marcia Bunge, a professor of theology and humanities in Valparaiso’s honors college (Christ College). “Thinking about children and our shared obligations to them provides a creative starting point for speaking about future hopes and as well as contentious moral, economic and political issues in ways that cut across conventional or ideological positions.”

Dr. Bunge launched the grant project in 2004, and since that time has edited three new books on children and been invited to participate in conferences and consultations throughout the world, including Norway, Malaysia, Australia, Ethiopia and the Dominican Republic.

The primary aim of Valparaiso’s project has been to strengthen religious understandings of children and childhood, and to foster dialogue about children among religious scholars, child advocates and others working with or on behalf of children.

“Although childhood was once a subject explored mainly in the areas of education or psychology, scholars from almost all fields are now publishing books or presenting papers in the area of childhood studies, and more college students are taking classes in the subject,” Dr. Bunge said. “It’s exciting to see not only the amount of growth in intellectual activity in the fields of theology and religious studies, but also how deeply this subject is resonating with people who are working with children.”

One way in which the grant has sought to fulfill its mission has been to publish foundational texts on religious understanding of children and childhood.

Prior to the grant, Dr. Bunge edited The Child in Christian Thought, the first major survey of the history of Christian thought on children. During her work with the Project, she has finished three additional forthcoming books. The first, The Child in the Bible, is a collection of essays by biblical scholars who explore themes of children and childhood in the Bible. The second book – Children, Childhood, and Religious Ethics: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives – provides reflections on children by leading scholars and ethicists from each of the three religious traditions.

The third book, Children and Childhood in World Religions, is co-edited with Dr. Don Browning of the University of Chicago and provides an introduction to religious understandings of children and childhood in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, along with primary texts from each tradition.

Dr. Bunge has strengthened the scope and aims of the Project in several additional ways, such as:

• Developing the Project Web site, which serves as a place where scholars can share information about courses they are teaching in the area of childhood studies;

• Serving on several national and international committees and consultations regarding children, including the national steering committees of new childhood studies program units of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literatures, as well as international advisory boards for the Center for the Theology of Childhood and the Search Institute’s Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence;

• Editing three booklets for the Child Theology Movement, an international organization of religious scholars, pastors and people working with children at risk, that provide an introduction to child theology;

• Serving as one of 16 members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s national task force which developed a social statement on education adopted by the ELCA’s Churchwide Assembly in 2007.

“The subject of childhood is compelling, in part, because every person on earth either once was or is a child,” Dr. Bunge said. “That’s one of the few roles we all share, no matter what our religious, national or ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, since many people do care deeply about children and their well-being, talking to people of different faiths about children builds hope and mutual understanding.”

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