Readings
Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative
Communities
"The Commission on Children at Risk, a panel of leading children's
doctors, research scientists and youth service professionals, has issued a
report to the nation about new strategies to reduce the currently high
numbers of U.S. children who are suffering from emotional and behavioral
problems such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit, conduct
disorders, and thoughts of suicide. The Commission is basing its
recommendations on recent scientific findings suggesting that children are
biologically "hardwired" for enduring attachments to other people and for
moral and spiritual meaning. Meeting children's needs for enduring
attachments and for moral and spiritual meaning is the best way to ensure
their healthy development, according to the Commission's report."
http://www.americanvalues.org/html/hardwired.html
Panel One--Impact of Family Violence. Family Violence Institute:
Integrating Responses to All Forms of Family Violence. Proceedings.
April 24, 2003. PP 40-8.
The Center for Human Services, UC Davis
Extension, University of California. Sponsored by Office of Child Abuse
Prevention, California Department of Social Services.
http://humanservices.ucdavis.edu/pdf/031_194_fvrt_proceedings.pdf
Right vs. Wrong - Raising a Child with A Conscience
(Click on book image to order from Indiana University Press)
"Teaching adults how to assist children in their moral development.
How do you teach children to pursue goodness in a morally confusing world? In this book, three child
rearing experts offer useful advice for nurturing the conscience in children and adolescents. Written
for parents, guardians, and all who work with young people, this book charts the growth of the sense
of right and wrong in children ages five to seventeen.
The authors describe important events in moral development: how crucial formative experiences instill
feelings of moral connectedness to others; how a sense of right and wrong finds expression in
value-based rules; how emotional well-being encourages rule-following as well as redress and healing
after wrongdoing; how the sense of moral autonomy and willpower changes over time.
They identify five transformations during these ages, which result in five increasingly sophisticated
stages of moral growth. The authors have named the stages after an important feature of each: the
External stage, the Brain-Heart stage, the Personified stage, the Confused stage, and the Integrating
stage. Each stage is illustrated by many examples and stories culled from years of interviews with
children and adolescents. The authors give special attention to how children and adolescents perceive
their parents and other adults as nurturing the development of their conscience. This insight becomes
a springboard for recommending what parents should and should not do to nurture conscience at
particular stages in their children's lives. Rearing a child with a healthy conscience is a dynamic
process: development guides parenting and parenting guides development.
The book also gives special attention to how human fallibility, defensiveness, and humor interact
with our sense of right and wrong. The authors portray these feelings through a character named the
Imp, representing mischief and fun, who comments throughout the book. And at times the authors step
up on a soapbox to speak as passionate advocates of the rightful needs of all children and adolescents
to receive moral nurturing. This book will help parents and other care givers in this carrying out
this important task."
Terror Heart
(Click on book image to order from New Century Publishing.)
"Communication between cultures has never been more important, and perhaps more rare,
than it is today. This is particularly true between Islamic and Christian segments of the western
world. In Terror Heart, author John E. Sullivan gives us a fast track explanation and education,
in disarming detail."
Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion
(Click on book image to order from McFarland & Co., Inc.
"This encyclopedia presents the religious affiliations and beliefs of 152 prominent
philosophers, in AÐZ entries. Biographical information is given about each with a special focus on
his or her religious upbringing, practice, and beliefs (or lack thereof). Each entry also contains
a brief summary of the points each philosopher has made concerning God and religion, typically
gathered from a study of the philosopherÕs writings. An examination of several complex issues,
including the existence and nature of God, human immortality, and the nature of religious language
and symbolism, is thus aided via numerous points of view."
The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times
(Click on book image to order from The University of Chicago Press.)
"This work is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to a scholarly and systematic analysis
of how soldiers returning from battle have been, or should be, treated morally. Long-scattered
historical material is pulled together from a variety of sources to show why and how the early
medieval custom of imposing penances on returning warriors first originated, and then, by the end
of the Middle Ages, had lapsed into disuse."
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
(Click on book image to order from Harper Collins.)
"Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved
a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender,
education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral
verdicts.
For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what
ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations
of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is
founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his
groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.
Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary
biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and
our everyday lives."
Spiritual Life of Children
(Click on book image to order from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)
"In this eighth and final volume in his Pulitzer Prizewinning Children of Crisis series, Coles examines the religious and
spiritual lives of children. By using children's own words and pictures, Coles presents their deepest feelings."
Picking Cotton
(Click on book image to order from MacMillan.)
"Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept.
She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald
insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence
that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his
innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never
committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face -- and forged an unlikely friendship
that changed both of their lives.
In their own words, Jennifer and Ronald unfold the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge
our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the
healing power of forgiveness."