Intersections of identity development, culture, and wellness in childhood are ongoing considerations in religious studies across disciplines. This interdisciplinary panel of paper presentations examines the formative nature of childhood spirituality, agency, and wellbeing in various settings and contexts. Panelists will draw from perspectives in literature, disability studies, zoology, and religious practices. Together, we will explore the futurity of the child and their spiritual lives in theory and practice.
Christian ministries in the United States and the Western Church have not yet put teens in the driver’s seat regarding self-directed spirituality. Despite affirming youth leadership, renewalist ministries (ie, ministries that the Charismatic Renewal Movement has influenced) have often commodified spirituality in children, teens, or young adults. Within U.S. ministry contexts, few age-appropriate resources exist to support Gen Z and Alpha's growing interest in spirituality. Age segregation has limited teens' participation in intergenerational conversations about encountering God, navigating cultural pluralism, and Christian spiritual formation. Without sufficient modeling and protection, teens have lacked opportunities to form identities based on their experiences and steward their unique gifts within community.
This research examines the conclusions teens at Mosaic Community Church drew about their own spirituality by analyzing adult community members' testimonies. Furthermore, it suggests a methodology to increase teens' agency in maneuvering spiritual narratives.
This paper explores how the serialized novel The Gold Thread by Norman MacLeod portrays children as mutual liberators of each other, and attends to the role it played in the social movement which led to the abolition of child labor in 19th century Scotland. In stark contrast to the highly moralized children's literature of Victorian Britain aimed at the middle class, in The Gold Thread Norman MacLeod uses literary form to create a story affirming the spiritual capacity and moral agency of children as mutual liberators of each other. This affirmation of the spiritual agency of children can be traced in MacLeod's radical publication Good Words for the Young, a periodical created for working class children. This paper offers insights both into the role that literature played in the advancement of the rights of working-class children in Scotland, as well as reflections on how MacLeod’s approach could act as a model for contemporary accounts of the significance of children’s spiritual lives and their status as persons with spiritual capacity and agency for mutual liberation.
This paper traces disability, religion, and animality through the category of the “runt” in twentieth-century America. It argues that the US government saw the racialized category of “superstition” as inherently debilitating for white children, and that such superstition rendered white children incapable of possessing the laboring body necessary for industrializing the rural South and Appalachia. Zoologists likened “white trash” children to the “runt of the litter” in pigs and theorized that their runtiness came from contact with Black religion: conjure and hoodoo disabled white child by giving them hookworm. Thankfully, runts could be rendered productive if treated like sickly animals. To shift from sickly animals to able-bodied children, though, required religion. Narrating the state’s medical zoology around children unearths new histories of religion and disability, particularly how the state came to sacrifice many actual children at the altar of the potential economic gains imagined in the futurity of the child.