This volume fills a gap in the literature of childhood studies. Social scientists are increasingly studying children as agents in societies and cultures, but they are only beginning to address religious issues in the lives of children and their families. Religious studies scholars, on the other hand, focus on the religious beliefs and practices of adults, and they are only beginning to investigate children's religious lives. Several scholars have published works on children and Christian theology and spirituality, but so far no one has tried to bring together in one book a collection of essays on children, childhood, and religious traditions, both Christian and non-Christian. Browning and Miller-McLemore's edited collection does just that.

Eleven essays pinpoint children and childhood in specific religious traditions, while two more are thematic in nature. In the first essay, Margaret Bendroth considers the changing models of childhood in mainline Protestant denominations. Her excellent historical overview takes the reader from the nineteenth-century child nurture theology of Horace Bushnell to the twentieth-century model of children as problems. Bendroth draws upon her extensive knowledge of mainline Protestantism to situate debates about children and childhood within these denominations. The second essay is equally provocative. John P. Bartkowski and Christopher G. Ellison, scholars of evangelical Protestantism, argue in their essay that evangelical advice literature contains a basic contradiction reflected in childrearing attitudes among evangelical parents: children are tainted by original sin and must be sternly disciplined using physical techniques like hitting the child, but a loving God cares for children and thus parents should treasure them with intimacy and affection.

Many of the essays that follow are merely descriptive, providing sound information about children in specific religious cultures but not making arguments as do the first two essays. These include Jennifer Beste's essay on American Catholicism, Elliot N. Dorff's essay on Judaism in America, David C. Dollahite's essay on Mormons, Roger Iron Cloud and Raymond Bucko's essay on Native Americans, Jane I. Smith's essay on Islam in America, Raymond Brady Williams's essay on Hinduism in America, and Jeffrey Meyer's essay on Confucianism in America. To their credit, these authors closely follow the instructions of the editors, who told them to write about doctrines and children, adult/child relationships, religious formation, and religion and institutions like governments and public schools. The volume is something like a handbook, then, in giving readers a ready-to-use guide for understanding children in a given church or non-Christian religion.

Two other essays go beyond the minimum required by the editors: Cheryl Townsend Gilkes's essay on African American Christianity, or the black church, and Rita M. Gross's essay on American Buddhisms. Gilkes writes from her own deep experience as a part of the black church as well as from her many years of studying it. Her essay has two parts. The first is a nuanced description of children in African American Christianity. The second is an attempt to supply what the black church is missing: a well-articulated theology of children. Until now, African American churches relied on folk wisdom about children to guide childrearing and religious education. Gilkes argues that it is high time that black Christians operated from a sensitively constructed child theology that reflects the complexity of both the black church experience and the challenges of postmodern life. Gross's essay is based on the author's decades-long participation in Buddhist practice as well as her equally long and respected career as a scholar of Buddhism. She uses several pages of her essay to discuss the two contrasting types of Buddhism in the United States: immigrant Buddhism and convert Buddhism. The former is composed of immigrants from Asian cultures, the latter of mostly white, middle- and upper-class Americans who began practicing Buddhism as adults in the 1960s and 1970s. Immigrant Buddhist groups now have several generations living in America, and they struggle with many of the same issues regarding children and assimilation that face other immigrant groups. The convert Buddhists are now reaching middle-age years, and their children have grown to adulthood. They, the parents, had to invent childrearing practices and educational programs for those children from scratch. In this regard they resemble another population of baby-boomers and their children, the Wiccans and Neopagans, who would have made an interesting addition to the book with an essay of their own. Finally, the last two essays in this collection address themes that cut across traditional and denominational boundaries. Paul D. Numrich looks at religious or parochial schools, and Emily Buss considers legal issues related to children and religion.

All of the authors are knowledgeable about their respective traditions. Some, like Dorff, Gilkes, Dollahite, Iron Cloud, Bucko, and Gross, are “insiders” and speak as such, in some cases clearly identifying themselves as participants in the cultural and religious worlds about which they write. Other authors are outsiders, but their record of scholarship on the traditions that they cover in this volume is impressive, and that scholarship pays off in the detail and insight they provide in their essays. I found no weak essays in this collection. The book is well worth having in your school or university library.

The one thing missing, which the editors admit that they did not intend to include, was the experiences and voices of children themselves. Occasionally a specific child or teenager who accomplished something noteworthy is singled out in an essay. Otherwise we do not hear from the children about whom this book was written. This reviewer still considers Robert Coles's The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) to be one of the best single-volume studies of children's self-reported religious or spiritual experiences and ideas. But much work is surely being done, and will continue to be done, to further the insights that Coles provided in his classic study. As that work and other scholarship on children and religion continues, this edited volume will stand as an indispensable source for multiple approaches to questions of children, childhood, and religion in America.