The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology by R. L.Stollar, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023. xvi + 323 pp. $24.99 (paperback). ISBN: 0‐8028‐8283‐8

In The Kingdom of Children, Stollar challenges negative attitudes toward children that spring from a fundamental misunderstanding of childhood. By so doing, he encourages us to criticize a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to say, ‘I don't like children’, whereas to declare one's distaste for any other demographic (‘I don't like women’, for example, or ‘I don't like elderly people’) would immediately draw a sharp rebuke. Drawing from a wide range of biblical and theological sources, he offers readers different ways of seeing children in the Bible, church and society. Most importantly, he shows that the rereading of childhood and the transformation of our harmful attitudes towards children is an important theological task. On the final point in particular, I could not agree more. Jesus declared that the kingdom belongs to ‘such as these’, indicating children. We need to take that much more seriously, and Stollar's work begs for further conversation. It begs for further conversation in part because the topic is vital. But it also begs for further conversation for some themes and conversation partners that are conspicuously absent. The first of these is Maria Montessori, whose theological anthropology of the child would have been a fascinating and fruitful subject to engage. Montessori insisted, as does Stollar, that the child is not a defective adult. Further questions might be asked about the way in which the argument is made. One of the pillars of the argument is Stollar's paraphrase of Jesus' words in Mark 10:24: ‘the kingdom of God belongs to children’. What about those Jesus names in the Beatitudes—the meek, those who mourn and those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness? And what about those who take the kingdom by force? Jesus says that the kingdom belongs to ‘such as these’. Stollar's book brings to the surface a key point of Gustavo Gutiérrez's liberation theology, one that deserves further attention. Although the work of liberation does involve the oppressed as ‘protagonists of their own liberation’ (quoted in Stollar, 133), full liberation is liberation for everyone. For the oppression to end, oppressors must be transformed as well. Children cannot be ‘liberated’ until adults stop treating them as inferior adults and recognize their rightful place among those to whom the kingdom of God belongs.