Iconoclasm as Child's Play is a rich interdisciplinary exploration of iconoclasm that will reward specialists in the histories and theologies of the Reformation and early modern Catholicism, the sociological and anthropological studies of religion and play, theological aesthetics, and the field of childhood studies. Moshenska, a professor of English at the University of Oxford, engages multiple disciplines, historic periods, and cultural contexts bringing them into a lively, and one might say, playful, exchange that is mutually disruptive and illuminating. Moshenska employs history, poetry, philosophy, theology, psychology, and art from antiquity to the postmodern period. He challenges simple binary distinctions between piety and play, religious and secular, sacred and profane, childhood and maturity, the past and the present to enter a dynamism that erupts at the boundaries.

A sermon delivered sometime in the 1530s in the west of England by Roger Edgeworth against what he saw as rising impiety sets the stage for the book, which proceeds in six chapters, each one teasing out the meanings and implications of a word related to children's play: “trifle,” “doll,” “puppet,” “fetish,” “play,” and “mask.” The book's conclusion mines the word “toy.” Edgeworth is responding to a distinctively domestic scene in which objects removed from churches in the iconoclastic fervor of the Reformation period have been given to children as playthings. Rather than being destroyed or repurposed for mundane use, these artifacts were trivialized as dolls, puppets, and toys on the assumption that such a move would satisfy those rooting out the vestiges of popery. That these objects linger in households with children who might dance with, laugh with, anthropomorphize, and even animate them opens the possibility that the objects will take on new meaning and power. To the “othering” of children, particularly children at play, imagined by adults in Western cultures as either angelic or fiendish, is added the worry that they are idolators or iconoclasts par excellence. It is hard to tell the difference, and this ambiguity is troubling for adults who, in many ways, stand radically on the outside of children's play.

Iconoclasm as Child's Play is captivating from the opening pages of the preface. Readers enter the paradox of iconoclasm and play as bricolage, as practices that involve destruction and creation simultaneously. A bricolage of sorts itself, the text draws from so many sources that readers will surely find themselves exploring a range of ideas, insights, and experiences that stretch them beyond the comfort zones of academic silos. The implications of Moshenka's work stand to benefit a range of questions facing church and society in the United States, including (the seemingly far afield) charged debates regarding the treatment and appropriation of images, symbols, and objects tied to our legacy of racism and white supremacy.

Iconoclasm as Child's Play is appropriate for scholars and the graduate-studies classroom. Read from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, the text is apt to prompt critical and creative dialogue about the sacramental imagination and clerical control over sacred images, objects, and spaces.