Children’s Spirituality and Traditions Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Do traditions contribute to children?s spirituality? Why and how so? From theoretical and practical considerations, this book explores children?s weaving of and distancing from family, cultural, educational, and religious traditions.

It examines the transformational relationship between traditions and young people?s lives and spirituality and pursues answers to the following questions:

• What kind of traditions influences young people?s spirituality and how are those influences exerted?
• How and under the influence of whom do children develop their own worldviews and their own sets of values?
• How does that contribute to their identity building?
• How is children?s spirituality connected to traditions?

The chapters in this book seek answers to these questions by delving into the varied influences that contribute to children?s spiritual development such as: construction of identities, the role of rituals, fables and symbols, subcultures and new religious movements, neoliberal educational practices and the importance of play and languages in spirituality experienced by both the children and the young.

Insightful and thought-provoking, this book will be a key resource for practitioners, researchers and scholars in theology and religious studies, early childhood and education, education, developmental psychology, and children?s studies, and will also appeal to anyone interested in understanding the relationship between traditions and young people?s lives. The chapters included in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Children's Spirituality.

Introduction: Beyond traditions, but not without them 1. Reflecting on Children’s Spiritual Experiences and Traditions 1. The role of culture and traditions in how young children’s identities are constructed 2. Cultivating Christians: North American family cultures and religious identity formation 3. The strings on David’s Harp: religious ritual as a container for spirituality 4. Silenced by performativity: The child’s right to a spiritual voice in an age of neoliberal educational imperatives 5. Navigating the spaces of children’s spiritual experiences: influences of tradition(s), multidisciplinarity and perceptions 2. Children’s Spirituality and Traditions in Action 6. Finding connections between spirituality and play for early childhood education 7. The study of the Persian mystical fable’s capacity to be rewritten as spiritual literature for children in the light of the theory of relational consciousness 8. Alternative religion kids: spiritual and cultural identity among children and youth involved with new religious movements 9. Enlivening thinking and speech in search of spiritual identity: the role of ‘speech formation’ in Steiner’s Waldorf education

Elaine Champagne holds the Religion, Spirituality and Health Chair at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Sciences (Laval University). Her research in practical theology focuses on spiritual care in pediatric contexts. Her recent projects examine relational dynamics, agency, vulnerability, and the hope of children in the context of serious illness.