Religious Dimensions of Child and Family Life: Reflections on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
the author of No Greater Love.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a document that was
adopted in 1989. It appears in this book as an appendix; like many
bureaucratic papers, it is weighed down with article numbers and
government-type parlance. The reflections on the document are by various
academics, and their deliberations are typically almost equal parts text
and footnotes. I suspect that some dissertations have been raided.

Heavy-going as all this sounds, much of the book is actually quite
readable. The featured religions are Islam, Christianity, Hinduism,
Buddhism, Judaism, the Bahai Faith, Chinese Popular Religion, and the
Canadian Aboriginal Perspective. The editors have supplied a
comprehensive introduction and conclusion, and there is a somewhat
daunting index. Most of the sections are interesting and reasonably
well-written. The Aboriginal Perspective becomes a rant against the way
First Nations have been treated, a valid but slightly irrelevant point
of view.

There is much historical and social information here that would be
useful to researchers and to anyone interested in the role of children
within a religious context.