az- The Mystery of the Child (Religion, Marriage, and Family): Books: Martin E. Marty
Apr07 Wm. B. Eerdmans. in mailroom today to be sent out "Must go Monday" on post-it written by rg.

Book Description:
Much of today's literature on children treats the child of any age as a problem or a set of problems to be solved, effectively reducing the child to a complex of biological and chemical factors, explainable in scientific terms, or to someone who is the object of control by adults.
In contrast, Martin Marty here presents the child as a mystery who invokes wonder and elicits creative responses that affect the care provided him or her.
Drawing on literature as new as contemporary poetry and as old as the Bible, this book encourages the thoughtful enjoyment of children instead of the imposition of adult will and control. Indeed, Marty treats the impulse to control as a problem and highlights qualities associated with children -- responsiveness, receptivity, openness -- that can become sources of renewal for adults.
The Mystery of the Child represents a new tack for Martin Marty -- universally respected as a historian, theologian, and interpreter of religion & culture -- but displays the same incisive, erudite quality marking the fifty-plus books and thousands of articles that Marty has previously written. His broad, thoughtful perspective will inspire readers to think afresh about what it means to be a child and what it means to be a caregiver. This book is sure to claim a wide readership -- parents, grandparents, teachers, humanists, theologians, historians -- engaging anyone wanting to explore more fully the profound realm of the child. which shouldn't that be, by grace, where we live ~ as this blurb on back:
this beautifully rendered book makes clear the deep truth of Gabriel Marcel's ? assertion that life is not a problem to be solved not a success to be strived for but a mystery to be lived well an event a time a play an open question ~ 'mystery' sounds too much to me like something that has an answer.

From Publishers Weekly:
Breathtakingly ambitious in scope, written with the author's customary sober and reflective erudition, this wide-ranging exploration of the wonders of the child is both inspirational and slightly elegiac in tone. Although it covers topics such as the tension between nature and nurture in child development, this is no ordinary child guidebook. Professor emeritus at the University of Chicago oh and a prolific writer on religion, culture, history and theology, Marty's deeply personal and sometimes dauntingly scholarly book urges his readers to abandon seeing a child as a problem to be controlled. Instead, he calls adults not only to nurture wonder in children, but to seek their own "childlikeness," or what, near the end of the book, he terms "childness." which it's like all I want, I am wholehearted into being with and like and enjoying children. oh that little girl outside Istria coming up to my legs with face and arms up, all open and smiling at me, hey baby. but I shy away from this talk, like the author of Rejuvenile distinguishing childishness from childlikeness though it's ok. so this seems like Rejuvenile (which I just read about, in cnnxn w Weeds, since Jenji Kohan the show creator is married to Christopher Noxon the author. and now think I recall seeing him on Colbert distinguishing btw childlike and childish) for thoughtful people. erudite, meditative, theological.
While the book is written with a general audience in mind, Marty's understanding of mystery and of childhood is unabashedly rooted in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. A random sampling of sources includes writers as diverse as the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.
Aimed at all who care for children, this volume is, at least in part, the fruit of Marty's work in Emory University's three-year study of "The Child in Law, Religion and Society." (Apr.)