Columns

Faith readings

By Paul Matthew St. Pierre

GROWING UP WITH GOD: USING STORIES TO EXPLORE A CHILD’S FAITH AND LIFE, by Nancy L. Cocks. Novalis, paper $14.95. Orders: tel. 1-800-387-7164, e-mail cservice@novalis.ca, Web site www.novalis.ca.

Children love stories. They’re such a lovely audience. They are very willing to suspend their disbelief, to be entertained, to live in the moment of telling, and to learn.

Nancy Cocks, who is a Canadian Presbyterian minister, loves to tell children stories and to use stories as an important part of her ministry to children. She is author of the Fergie the Frog series of adventure stories for children.

Several years ago she started The Story Project, in which “volunteers ... used a collection of stories I had written, along with short reflections, questions, and prayers, to see if and how the interests of children might surface in conversations stimulated by story-telling. Participants offered both written comments and face-to-face interviews describing their experience. Some of the stories I’ve written are also used by Roman Catholic educators in their classrooms; I’ve included some insights children shared in that setting.”

The current book has three parts. Part I, the bulk of the book, is an extensive discussion of the principles of story-telling to children, with particular emphasis on what could be called their “reception theory”: how they respond to stories, how stories can teach them, and how stories can foster their spiritualities.

Part II comprises selections from three of Nancy Cock’s children’s story sequences: Fergie the Frog, Sherman the Hound Dog, and Jackie Rabbit.

Part III is a thematic index to these stories, emphasizing faith and life themes and Biblical situations, and a list of resources.

The whole package is a primer for parents, ministers, teachers, and catechists who are responsible teaching religion to young children. I believe Nancy Cocks is concerned here less with promoting her own stories than with encouraging her readers to develop their own pedagogies and reader reception theories.

Her book would make an excellent complement to school and parish curricula, and to home libraries as well.

PRAYING THROUGH YOUR DIVORCE, by Karen O’Donnell. St. Anthony Messenger Press, paper US$6.95. Orders: tel. 513-241-5615, Web site www.AmericanCatholic.org.

The expression “adult children of,” as in “adult children of alcoholics,” sometimes seems a self-referential turn of phrase for people who cannot transcend their childhood trauma. Children who have survived their parents’ divorce are certainly not rare in North American society. Those who do not see themselves merely as “the adult children of divorced parents” may have their parents to thank for their emotional stability, for having continued to parent after the break-up.

This book is for all of them. Karen O’Donnell is a divorced Catholic, the “single” mother of two young children. Her book is a collection of exquisitely spare prayers for anyone in a difficult marriage or going through a divorce.