Publication date:
18 January 2019Length of book:
206 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781538126004
Part memoir, part cultural exploration, this book covers the author’s journey as she grows up in an evangelical Christian home, leaves religion behind as a young adult, and goes on to raise children in a family outside of religious belief. Maria Polonchek weaves a personal story with up-to-date studies and philosophic exploration of what it means to raise secular children in an otherwise religious world. Offering careful and respectful advice for other parents who are raising their children outside of a particular religious belief system, she explores the many other ways of instilling identity, belonging, and meaning into our lives and the lives of children.
Honest and irreverent, the author admits to her religious “baggage” and searches for better understanding of such topics as religious education, morality, awe, death, purpose, and meaning, and tradition from secular perspectives. She interviews experts, looks at various studies, and turns to a variety of sources for answers, while maintaining a casual and personal tone. While she ultimately argues for parents to let their children shape their own beliefs, she encourages families to tend to existential and social needs that sometimes go unnoticed or unconsidered in life outside religion.
Honest and irreverent, the author admits to her religious “baggage” and searches for better understanding of such topics as religious education, morality, awe, death, purpose, and meaning, and tradition from secular perspectives. She interviews experts, looks at various studies, and turns to a variety of sources for answers, while maintaining a casual and personal tone. While she ultimately argues for parents to let their children shape their own beliefs, she encourages families to tend to existential and social needs that sometimes go unnoticed or unconsidered in life outside religion.
Poet and essayist Polonchek, having been pushed away from religion by the fire-and-brimstone theology of her Christian youth, revels in her identity as an 'apostate' and secular humanist: 'Because my identity as a child was so rooted in the religion given to me, my identity as an adult is rooted in my deconversion.' Polonchek notes that roughly 80% of Americans identify as religious and that most rely on religious institutions to help educate their children, but then wonders how nonreligious families will provide for the moral formation of their families. Embarking on a mission to fill this gap, she synthesizes the work of Dale McGowan, Arnold van Gennep, and Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget, as well as the fresh, hilarious musings of Neil Carter on his blog, Godless in Dixie. Religion may have failed Polonchek, but her well-researched, swiftly moving exploration of the development of morality, meaning, and awe during childhood will be worth a look for readers interested in childhood development.