Lost in the Mystery of God: Childhood in the History of Christian Spirituality

At the heart of much scholarship on religion, there is a child hiding, however unacknowledged. How might scholars of Christian spirituality contribute to a theological account of childhood that resists the tendency to essentialize? How might we take seriously children’s experience in all its complexity and uncontrollability? This essay finds in Augustine a way of understanding theological reflection on childhood as a spiritual practice that can only be appropriated through attention to the specificity of childhood experience. Our childhoods, according to Augustine, are lost in the mystery of God. For him, our struggle to understand childhood cannot be uncoupled from our search for God.