Lexington Books
Pages: 158
Trim: 6⅜ x 10
978-0-7391-2947-0 • Hardback • September 2009 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7391-4192-2 • eBook • September 2009 • $108.00 • (£83.00)
Mary M. Doyle Roche is assistant professor and Edward Bennett Williams Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.
Chapter 1 Introduction: Children in a Peaceable Kingdom
Chapter 2 Chapter One. Reading the Signs of the Times: Consumer Culture and the Commercialization of Childhood
Chapter 3 Chapter Two. Children's Rights and Family Values
Chapter 4 Chapter Three. Children and the Common Good
Chapter 5 Chapter Four. A Model of Resistance and Transformation: The Cristo Rey Story
Chapter 6 Conclusion: Keeping Christmas Well
Anyone concerned about children's welfare as laborers and consumers in today's complicated economic order should read this book. What a rich exemplar of what Catholic social teaching has to offer! With vivid story and well-documented argument, Mary M. Doyle Roche suggests that children must become fuller social participants in sustaining the common good, protected in their vulnerability and included in their wisdom and energy.
— Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Vanderbilt University Divinity School
Mary M. Doyle Roche has written a riveting book, deeply troubling, yet profoundly hopeful. Capturing the vulnerability of children exploited by poverty, sex trafficking, soldiering, and inhuman labor, she investigates the structural manipulation of market related forces as the root cause of contemporary child abuse. Turning to the common good, she offers a fundamental counter strategy to better protect and incorporate the child. Along the way, she makes us attentive to the intrinsic human dignity and evident agency of the child. A beautifully written and compelling work.
— James F. Keenan, SJ, Boston College
Drawing richly from Christian theological principles and from contemporary global trends, this book offers a perceptive and original analysis of a much neglected topic. Roche's evident deep concern for the wellbeing of children is matched by the good sense she demonstrates in sorting out contending claims about the appropriate agency of our youngest neighbors in our age of mass consumption. In challenging the boundaries that artificially divide the spheres of public and private, market and family, economy and society, this book makes the unique contribution of vividly charting the lived experience of children in the market culture that shapes our entire world.
— Thomas Massaro, SJ, Professor of Moral Theology, Fordham University; author of Living Justice
With this book, Mary Doyle Roche advances the treatment of children in the field of Christian Ethics. One of the most significatn emergent Roman Catholic scholars focusing on children...her book should shape ethical conversation in the field for years to come.
— INTAMS review: Journal for the Study of Marriage & Spirituality