Young people everywhere seem to experience religion in their everyday living environments. They do theology. The question is how faith communities and theologians can nurture a creative and sensitive dialogue with these young people? More so, can we as researchers learn from each other across disciplines and geographic distances and how could the result of comparative dialogical research be relevant for youth ministry work and teaching? This contribution focuses on the value and prospects of comparative youth research on the everyday (...) life of these young people for academic theologians. While it takes the approach of Meredith McGuire as a starting point as she challenges dominant Western approaches to the study of religion, yet this contribution also aims to maintain theological perspective, as I seek to find connections. (shrink)

The problematique addressed by the article is the growth of a dominant discourse in early childhood education and care, which has a strong effect on policy and practice, paralleled by an increasing number of other discourses which problematise most of the values, assumptions and understandings of the former. Yet there is very little engagement between these discourses, in large part because they are situated within different paradigms—modernity in the former case, postfoundationalism in the latter. The author argues that the absence (...) of dialogue and debate impoverishes early childhood and weakens democratic practice. The article considers whether and in what conditions the concept of agonistic pluralism might provide a framework for political engagement among at least some on either side of the paradigmatic divide, and takes evaluation as one example of a subject for an agonistic politics of early childhood. (shrink)

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed form a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as education arguing that the children`s expressions are offering new beginning and change in the pedagogical thinking and praxis within the (...) early childhood setting. (shrink)

This article looks briefly at the theological history and contemporary issues surrounding children regarding sexuality and gender and explores what the future of feminist theologies has to offer them as autonomous subjects. Within this I suggest that the cross pollination of ideas from art, quantum theology and the new cosmology can enrich the future of feminist theologies by opening up the theological debate to new ways of thinking, doing and living more justly. The inclusion of children’s embodied lives in the (...) bigger theological cosmological picture allows us to engage with their subjectivity; it also challenges existing patriarchal values that dominate and affect the future flourishing of our radical human equality, the equality of all life and the planet Earth itself. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While ‘child as educator’ may appear to reverse the typical power relations between adults and children, it is argued that this motif in fact repeats many of the same problems as any (...) claims about what children, and especially what ‘child’, is like. Specifically, the paper first reviews analyses of what is at stake in the figure of ‘child’; second, feminist engagement with the notion of ‘intersectionality’ is discussed in terms of how it might inform debates about childhood. Finally, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches, analysis focuses on the notion of misrecognition structured in the ‘as’ connecting ‘child’ and ‘educator’. (shrink)