Children, Literature, and the Christian Imagination, October 23-24, 2026
Bolintineanu, Alexandra
“The Echoes Did Not Die”: Storytelling Traditions and Endings in The Lord of the Rings
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s major literary lectures, examine story-worlds of the Christian imagination: the Christian Beowulf-poet’s vision of a pre-Christian heroic world; and fairy tales’ amalgamated world view. The first of these story-worlds “ends in night” (Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”); the other “begins and ends in joy” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”). This paper examines a moment in The Lord of the Rings where these two storytelling traditions and expectations for endings collide: the battle of Helm’s Deep. The people of Rohan, whose language, poetry, and culture draw deeply on Old English, are heroic but threatened with extinction, very much in the Old English poetic tradition of Anglo-Saxon England as Tolkien imagined it. The king of Rohan, Théoden, plans a final charge from the stronghold. This charge is a deliberate echoing of Rohan’s heroic past–a heroism, in Tolkien’s reading of Beowulf, whose wages are death. Yet here, this reaching back into the heroic past ends not in destruction, but in eucatastrophe. As the heroic past echoes with the present, it brings not doom, as in Beowulf, but rescue. This paper uses the sound imagery of horn music to trace how Tolkien grafts the heroic pre-Christian culture of Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England onto what he sees as an essentially Christian fairytale dynamic, so that past and present intertwine, coming to one another’s rescue, and a joyous ending.
Alexandra Bolintineanu teaches medieval literature and digital humanities at the Centre for Medieval Studies and Woodsworth College. Her research focuses on medieval wonders and monsters, digital pedagogy and illegal typewriters. She coordinates Woodsworth College’s minor program in Digital Humanities. Students in Professor Bolintineanu’s courses learn to create digital exhibits and maps, turn medieval riddles into video games, and build digital archives of the lives of banned and endangered books. Professor Bolintineanu received the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Early Career Award (2019); the Medieval Academy of America’s CARA Teaching Prize (2023); and the University of Toronto’s Early Career Teaching Award (2022-23).
Choi, Christine
God’s Story: Children’s Illustrated Bibles Over Time
The search term “children’s Bibles” yields a dizzying number and range of titles for the parent, teacher, or scholar contemplating how Christian Scripture might be presented to a child. While analyses of how children’s literature engages with questions of faith and spirituality have increased, this paper focuses particularly on how the Bible itself has been narrated and illustrated for young English-speaking readers over time.
After a brief historical overview of illustrated Bibles, this paper will examine three specific twenty-first century texts aimed at elementary school children: The Jesus Storybook Bible (Zonderkidz, 2007); The Story of All Stories (Word on Fire Votive, 2025); and The Action Bible: God’s Redemptive Story (David C. Cook, 2010). As their titles suggest, the idea of the Bible as a unified narrative composed by God, and the invitation to children to become part of this story is a crucial feature of their pedagogical approach. Indeed, I argue that the principles of narrative theology, as they emerged in the twentieth century, deeply influenced the vision of authors and illustrators who have since sought to engage children into the big “story” of Scripture.
As part of a larger project about the evolution of children’s devotional and theological materials from the eighteenth century to the present day, this paper is animated by a public humanities focus, seeking to bring literary scholarship of religious children’s texts into conversation with the activities of parents and teachers in their places of spiritual instruction.
Christine Choi is a scholar of Victorian literature and religion, and received her PhD from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, Theological Visions of Community in Victorian Fantasy Literature, argues that George MacDonald’s, Charles Kingsley’s, and Christina Rossetti’s theological perspectives shape their aesthetic theories and practice of fantasy. By contending that it is because of—not in spite of—their religious perspectives that MacDonald, Kingsley, and Rossetti participated in these imaginative acts of adaptation, Christine’s research offers a corrective to histories of modern fantasy’s development that obscure the theological origins of Victorian fantasy.
Diemer, Joe
Learning with Margaret Gatty
For nineteenth-century author and naturalist Margaret Gatty, scientific research encompassed both observation and revelation. Her multivolume children’s book series Parables from Nature (1855-1861) persistently rejects materialist theorizing, insisting instead that nature is a book whose end is already written, and whose story must be approached with faithful humility. Rather than reading this teleological perspective as a quaint relic of nineteenth-century natural theology, this paper suggests that Gatty’s insistence on remaining open to revelation—that is, to being surprised by new and unexpected forms of understanding—might offer new strategies for thinking through (and, perhaps, against) contemporary learning models. Focusing on her 1855 parable “Knowledge not the Limit of Belief” and reflecting on my own experiences learning with and about her work, I argue that Gatty’s measured efforts to encourage children’s imaginations while simultaneously recognizing the limits of human understanding form a useful counterpoint to today’s totalizing, regurgitative forms of knowledge production. In the midst of Victorian debates about evolution, pedagogy, and their consequences for the future of the human species, Gatty carefully positioned herself in opposition to (what she understood as) arrogant and harmful efforts to reduce both human and non-human nature to a muddle of obscene instincts. In the midst of a twenty-first century pedagogical crisis, her emphasis on learning that seeks knowledge without achieving complete explanation sits in direct contradiction to modes of learning that focus on speedy responses and shallow satisfaction. While most learners today (both young and old) are not seeking divine revelation, they are anxious for answers. This paper will show that while Gatty does not always supply these answers, she doesoffer alternate methods for asking questions.
Joe Diemer is a PhD student co-enrolled in the English department and Book History specialization at the University of Toronto. Their dissertation proposes the ocean as a key site of possibility for nineteenth-century children’s literature. Through immersion in literary seascapes, Joe’s research seeks to explore how the Victorians thought of their evolutionary inheritances and responsibilities as well as how they projected these inheritances and responsibilities onto the figure of the child.
Kim, Hyeon-Kyeong
From Fear to Hope: Emotional Narratives and Human-Nature Relationships in Korean Environmental Picturebooks
Environmental issues have become one of the most pressing global concerns of our time. Accordingly, environmental education has been widely emphasized across educational settings, and environmental issues are frequently addressed in children’s literature, particularly in picturebooks. In an effort to communicate the seriousness of the environmental crisis, however, many environmental narratives tend to rely heavily on emotions such as fear, guilt, and despair.
Although fear-inducing narratives are often employed to raise awareness, scholars have cautioned that they may leave readers with feelings of helplessness (Shin, 2013). Such concerns are especially significant in children’s literature, where repeated exposure to fear-based stories may contribute to eco-anxiety or ecological phobia, while little attention has been given to how these emotions shape children’s understanding of human–nature relationships.
To address this gap, this study examines the dominant emotional narratives in Korean environmental picturebooks and explores how they construct human–nature relationships. Drawing on the Christian narrative framework of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration as an interpretive lens, this research investigates three key questions: what specific emotions are primarily utilized, how these emotions shape the depicted human–nature dynamics, and how this relationship can be reinterpreted through a theological framework. Ultimately, the study discusses the meanings and limitations of these narrative constructions and explores how Christian imagination may offer a more hope-filled and restorative understanding of the relationship between humans and the created world.
Hyeon-Kyeong Kim is a lecturer in the Department of Early Childhood Education at Gyeongin National University of Education in South Korea and a researcher at the Picturebook Worldview Research Center. She holds a PhD in children’s literature education. Her research explores picturebooks, worldview, and meaning-making, with particular attention to ecological narratives, human–nature relationships, and the ways values and perspectives are communicated through children’s literature. She is also interested in the cultural circulation of children’s literature across educational and social contexts.
Labriola, Christina
David Almond and the Miracle of the Ordinary
At the heart of British author David Almond’s compellingly lyrical children’s literature is a moving engagement with the pain, joy, and wonder fundamental to human experience. His Blakean, religiously inflected imagery reveals a preoccupation with the fantastical, magical, and uncanny amidst the ordinary stuff of life. Seeing through childlike eyes, his work emphasises the power of the imagination, creativity, and discovery, together with the radical tenderness possible in human relationships, to offer hope, meaning, and an affirmation of life’s profound goodness.
Almond’s universe is imbued with a feeling for the transcendent and sublime in and through the tangible and ordinary. His storytelling readily engages with the supernatural through the quotidian, locating the miraculous in the everyday; the mythic amidst the mundane. Almond’s characters, and their readers with them, experience renewals of harmony and wonder – moments of poignant awareness that life is shot through with joy, beauty, and a “pattern for meaningfulness.” As such, his fiction presents a spiritually rich vision of incarnate reality – a sensitivity to mystery, promise, and enchantment – which, as I will argue, resonates with a sacramental worldview.
While Almond’s work hinges on Fantasy and Magic Realism, it may be more precise to describe it, after Rosemary Ross Johnston, as “Mystical Realism.” Exploring Almond’s fiction along these lines, this paper takes up this more nuanced characterisation, defining such an approach as a theologically meaningful search for the sacramental – the felt recognition of the divine presence permeating the ordinary realities of beauty (both natural and artistic) and human love.
Christina Labriola holds graduate degrees in sacred music and in pastoral theology from the Toronto School of Theology at the University of Toronto. As a theologian, musician, and educator at home in the Roman Catholic tradition, her academic work focuses primarily on the intersection of music and the arts with Christian spirituality, theological aesthetics, and liturgy. She is passionate about embracing a sacramental worldview and exploring mystical theologies, especially those that engage the imagination and heart through creative and holistic approaches, and bring music, literature, and art into the realm of prayer, religious experience, and the spiritual life.
Lee, Angela Soo-hyung
A Christian Critique of Surreal Imagery in Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer
The purpose of this study is to examine the Christian implications of surreal imagery and moral imagination in Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer.
The picture book creates a dystopian atmosphere through surreal imagery and presents fourteen consecutive spreads beginning with imperatives introduced by Never, including “Never ask for a reason.” On the back cover, the statement “Never break the rules. Especially if you don’t understand them.” demands obedience to authority without explaining the meaning or justification of the rules themselves. The surreal imagery of the picture book forms what this study calls “invisible rules,” which in turn legitimize unexplained authority.
This interpretation is consistent with Walter Benjamin’s discussion of surrealist art as a worldview that challenges traditional systems of rules and established structures of meaning.
This study argues that the surreal imagery of Rules of Summer constructs a narrative structure that encourages readers to accept “invisible rules” and “unexplained authority” as natural. This narrative structure relativizes the traditional moral order and weakens moral discernment by creating cultural conditions that justify uncritical obedience to unexplained authority. Consequently, Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer reveals cultural conditions that enable voluntary conformity to unexplained authority in contemporary society and may therefore be understood as supporting soft totalitarianism.
The significance of this study lies in re-examining the imagination and worldview shaped by children’s literature from a Christian perspective, thereby reaffirming the importance of social order and moral discernment.
Angela Soo-hyung Lee holds a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) in Child Studies from Sungkyunkwan University. She is an adjunct professor in the Department of Language Therapy and Child Care at Ansan University. Her research focuses on picturebook studies, visual literacy, children’s literature and worldview.
Lorch, Tim
“To drink instruction mix’d with pure delight”: Biblical and Spiritual Justification for Children’s Riddle Books in Eighteenth-Century England
Compared to the “vulgar” and “Scandal[ous]” riddles of the “last Ages,” as is explained in the anonymousThesaurus ænigmaticus (1727) printed by John Wilford, the “polite” riddles, or enigmas, of the eighteenth-century are not mere bawdy entertainment, but a test of judgement and close reading (v). For English children’s book printers in the latter half of the century (specifically, John Nicholson, John Gardner, John Newbery, and Elizabeth Newbery), the rational amusement provided by riddle books is directly linked to the development of close reading skills required for learning and understanding sacred history. This paper analyses and expands upon this clear appeal to spirituality as a didactic justification of the sale and consumption of children’s riddling books—an explicitly cheap form of print culture. This research will also speak to and broaden the work on children’s pedagogy and reading habits in late-eighteenth century England. An examination of the frontmatter of these children’s texts demonstrates that printers wanted to explicitly fit their own riddling within the long Biblical tradition of enigmatic interpretation (for example, Samson’s riddle from the Book of Judges). Not only Christian in its content, the riddle also putatively functions in these texts as a playfully Lockean form of education to develop and sharpen exegetical skills in children, which is particularly evident in John Gardner and John Nicholson’s confusing riddle text, Time Well Spent (1765). Whether or not in good faith, this niche portion of popular print culture for children is justified explicitly through a Protestant Christian spirituality—one of inward reflection and close-reading.
Timothy Lorch is a PhD student in the department of English at the University of Toronto.
Ma, Sheng-mei
Sinic/Cynic Conversion: American Born Chinese, um, Christian;Disney+, um, Minus Chin-Kee and Danny
To be nostalgically sinic in diaspora is to be a cynic, either knowingly, as this aged disillusioned romantic is guilty of, or “without knowing it,” as award-winning, innocence-feigning Gene Luen Yang appears to dabble in. Whereas cynics out themselves by tiresome naysaying, as I have been accused of, Yang in American Born Chinese (2006) and a number of other Asian American artists are true cynics in not owning the liberty they take of sinic conversion on paper and onscreen, in images and in sound, to access America’s inebriating, lily-white party. Conversions belie contortions performed by off-white, yellow-ish contortionists in white masks, bending backwards, slanting sideways, pun intended, in the name of subverting, yet subconsciously vouching for, white invisibility and privilege: minority deconstruction in theory; majority revalidation in practice, either Christian ethos hiding in plain sight in Yang’s comic panels or commercial exoticizing and mainstreaming in Disney+ adaptation.
Ostensibly in support of ethnic pride, overwhelming self-interest in the fulfillment of the American dream drives Yang et al. to consign Chineseness, embodied by immigrant characters, to “doglike,” the Greek root of kunikos for cynic, abjection. The rise of ethnic identity in Yang’s bildungsroman hinges on the “immigrant license” of speaking as American Born Chinese, while the graphic novel ought to be rechristened as American Born Christian. Catholicism rather than Chineseness lies deep in the artist’s bones. Things Chinese become a pet-like, pest-like familiar to the Christian white wannabe, or Cousin Chin-Kee to the whitewashed, made-over Danny in the book. By contrast, Kelvin Yu’s series, to cater to Disney+ brand of family value, eliminates offensive Orientalism and white supremacy, crystalized in Chin-Kee and Danny, respectively.
Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美) is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Chinese Serial (2026); Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).
Morriello, Francesco
The Good Goblin? Christian Morality and the Reinvention of Fantasy’s Most Unlikely Creature
This paper examines the evolving figure of the goblin in children’s literature from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring how goblins have served as moral instruments through which authors negotiate changing understandings of virtue and faith. It argues that the changing literary goblin reflects a broader movement in children’s literature away from overt Christian didacticism toward more pluralistic and psychologically complex moral frameworks shaped by secularization and ethical uncertainty. In Victorian and early twentieth-century literature, goblins frequently operated within explicitly Christian and didactic frameworks. Works such as Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872) depict goblins as embodiments of temptation, greed, spiritual decline, and disobedience. These narratives reinforced clear moral binaries in which virtuous conduct was rewarded and moral failure punished, presenting goblins as external manifestations of sin and disorder.
The paper then traces a significant shift in contemporary literature, where goblins increasingly occupy morally ambiguous roles. In works such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (2014), goblins are no longer simply monstrous antagonists but figures through which authors explore prejudice, exclusion, capitalism, and systemic injustice. Rather than delivering explicit moral lessons, these texts relocate moral inquiry from individual sin to broader questions of identity and social responsibility. In doing so, they reflect the decline of Christian moral binaries and the rise of more ambiguous moral landscapes in modern children’s literature.
Francesco A. Morriello is an Assistant Professor in the Book and Media Studies program at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. His research focuses on print culture, propaganda, and communication networks from the 17th to 20th centuries. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge and an MTS in religion from Harvard University. He is the author of Messengers of Empire: Print and Revolution in the Atlantic World (2023), and is currently working on his second book, which provides a rare transoceanic account of how different Catholic orders used print media and communications to compete for souls and influence across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.
Patra, Kajori
Sacred Lives and Distant Deaths: Interrogating Religious Martyrdom in Colonial, Post-Mutiny British Children’s Fiction
My paper examines three children’s novels, Bryda, Lost in the Jungle and Grace Ogilvie, responding to the Indian Revolt of 1857, arguing that these texts reimagine the relationship between Christian childhood and death in nineteenth-century children’s literature. In contrast to the era’s dominant “joyful death” tradition (Philippe Ariès), where children’s deaths were equated with spiritual transcendence, these post-Mutiny novels avoid juvenile martyrdom, instead constructing an alternative model of Christian virtue grounded in survival and British imperial identity. The child protagonists survive due to what the texts frame as distinctly Christian courage: the inability to grieve the deaths of imperial children.
The 1857 Indian Revolt generated over eighty mutiny novels between 1859-1957. My presentation reveals how children’s literature participated in what Lydia Murdoch identifies as the systematic “suppression” of traumatic child death narratives from public memory. While contemporary accounts show child mortality rates significantly exceeded adult deaths during events like Lucknow riots, these novels displace mortality onto Indian characters while positioning Christian children as exemplars of imperial bravery. Death itself is rendered non-Christian through its omnipresence in native lives – through narratives of widow-burning and violent mutineers, and through ominous paratextual elements.
My paper also examines cross-religious cooperation in these novels, since the survival of Christian children depends on assistance from “loyal” native characters, anticipating the Crown’s post-1857 policy of reduced religious interference in colonies. By refocussing attention on Christian bravery instead of childhood deaths during the Mutiny, these texts reveal the negotiation of religious imagination, imperial ideology, and children’s literary culture during a pivotal moment in British-Indian relations. They offer new insights into how Christian childhood identity adapted to colonial crisis, transforming potential trauma into triumphant imperial narrative.
Kajori Patra is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, University of Florida. Her research interests include postcolonial children’s literature, and Cold War-era children’s science fantasy. Patra is the recipient of the 2026 Children’s Literature Association’s Hannah Beiter Grant for her project on Premendra Mitra’s science fantasy.
Paul, Lissa, Pamela Mordecai, and Robert Priest (panel)
Composing God: Variations by Ted Hughes, Pamela Mordecai and Robert Priest
God is a character, most famously of course in his book, the Bible. But that hasn’t stopped novelists, artists, sculptors, dramatists and poets across geographies, languages, cultures and time from composing God stories of their own. On this panel are three very different variations on God, some of his family members, and on their interactions with people. To begin, Lissa Paul will speak to What is the Truth?: A Farmyard Fable for the Young (1984), by the former British poet laureate Ted Hughes (1930–1998). It is one of his best-known God-story creations; an imagined heavenly conversation—set up as a kind of new Testament back story—between God and his son. The panel will then move to presentations by two renowned poets both based in Toronto: British/Canadian Robert Priest and Jamaican/Canadian Pamela Mordecai. Both will read from their own God—and/or Jesus—poems and speak to their respective imaginative versions. Pam and Robert both write for children as well as adults and though their “God” poems are not specially for children, like the Bible itself, their poems are not age-defined. Robert Priest will speak to his 2008 Reading the Bible Backwards (2008), his reverse-engineered versions of Bible stories. Pamela Mordecai will be speaking to poems in her performance poem trilogy: de Man, (1995), de book of Mary (2015) and de book of Joseph (2022).
- Lissa Paul: The Truth be Told about What is the Truth? (1984)
For Christian readers—especially readers of the King James Bible—the title of What is the Truth? reads instantly as a riff on Pilate’s line in John 18:38: “What is truth?” asks Pilate rhetorically. In the Bible Pilate is responding to Jesus’s lines in the preceding verse: “Thou sayest that I am a king,” says Jesus, “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” At some level the narrative premise on which Hughes composes his book is the—imagined—back story to those lines, the conversation between God and his son prior to the events that follow: the arrival of Jesus on earth to “bear witness unto the truth.” But the Christian story isn’t the only one Hughes tells. He also tells Buddhist stories, in that the book is structured to mirror traditional Jataka tales: 500 tales, essentially animal fables, moral tales featuring animal incarnations of the Buddha. The narrative structure—prose frames around individual animal poems—is, in fact, a characteristic format of traditional Jataka tales. In her talk, Lissa will play out the cross-cultural fusions inherent in What in the Truth?, though she will also attend to what Hughes scholar Ann Skea describes as Hughes’s “lifelong goal . . . to explore the divine within and around us and to mitigate our alienation from it.”
- Pamela Mordecai will discuss and read from her trilogy: de Man, de book of Mary and de book of Joseph.
- Robert Priest will discuss and read from his poetry collection Reading the Bible Backwards.
Lissa Paul is a professor in the Department of English at Brock University and former Director of the PhD programme in Interdisciplinary Humanities. She works in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Children’s Literature. Recent publications include Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (2019), a new edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature, co-edited with Philip Nel and Nina Christensen (2021) and “Readers and Libraries” in volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Children’s Literature (2026). Both volumes of The Fenwick Letters 1797-1840: A Transnational Feminist Life Reconstructed will be in print in 2026.
Pamela (Pam) Mordecai is a poet, playwright, novelist and writer of short fiction for children and adults. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated there and in the USA, Mordecai is a trained language arts teacher with a PhD in English who has compiled/co-compiled numerous textbooks for the Caribbean and edited/co-edited five anthologies of the writing of Caribbean women. She won Jamaica’s inaugural Vic Reid Award for children’s writing for Ezra’s Goldfish and Other Storypoems (1995) and her short story, “Once on the Shores of the Stream, Senegambia” was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr Award for Speculative Fiction (now the Otherwise Prize) in 2001. Her debut novel, Red Jacket, was shortlisted for the 2015 Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize and de book of Joseph (2022), most recent of her nine poetry collections, was a finalist for the OCM BOCAS Prize in 2023. Her poems are featured in compilations for Poetry in Voice (Canada) and Poetry Out Loud (UK) and have been translated into Spanish, French, Serbian and Romanian. Mordecai often writes in Jamaican Patwa or Patwa-inflected English. She lives in Toronto.
Robert Priest was born in Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, England, and briefly studied mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, before leaving university to write poetry. A prolific writer of verse for children and adults, Robert is also a novelist, playwright and performer, singer and songwriter, and journalist. His collections of poetry include The Visible Man (1980); Sadness of Spacemen (1980); The Man Who Broke Out of the Letter X (1984); The Mad Hand (1988), winner of a Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Award; Scream Blue Living: New and Selected Poems (1992); and Reading the Bible Backwards (2008). His recent works for young adults include the books of children’s poetry The Secret Invasion of Bananas (2002) and Rosa Rose (2013), The Wolf is Back (2013) and the Spell Crossed fantasy trilogy comprising The Paper Sword (2014), Second Kiss (2015) and Missing Piece (2016). For adults, If I Didn’t Love the River was published in 2022 (ECW Press). A recent collection, Accidents After Happening, was published in 2025 by ECW Press.
Polanka, Francisca Orellana
Imagining Faith, Imagining Whiteness: Racialized Representations and the Christian Imagination in Children’s Literature
This paper examines how Christian children’s literature constructs relationships among race, sacred authority, and cultural belonging. Focusing on illustrated Bibles and contemporary retellings, it argues that the problem of Eurocentric religious representation extends beyond visual inclusion to questions of interpretive power. Drawing on critical race studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, children’s literature scholarship, Indigenous studies, theology, and visual culture, the paper develops the concept of sacred racial socialization to describe the representational processes through which children encounter associations among racialized bodies, sacred geography, religious authority, and belonging.
The study compares three representational models: the normalization of Eurocentric sacred imagery, the multicultural plurality of Desmond Tutu’s Children of God Storybook Bible, and the Indigenous-oriented interpretive strategies of Terry M. Wildman’s Birth of the Chosen One and the broader First Nations Version project. Through these comparisons, the paper distinguishes between representation, plurality, and interpretive authority. It argues that decolonizing Christian children’s literature requires more than increasing racial diversity; it also requires making cultural mediation visible and recognizing historically marginalized communities as producers of religious meaning.
The paper further proposes the concepts of representational unmarking and cultural distance from the sacred to explain how culturally specific Eurocentric forms can acquire the appearance of universality. Ultimately, it argues for a relational model of Christian representation in which historical specificity, cultural plurality, and interpretive authority coexist without requiring marginalized children to approach the sacred through another culture’s presumed universality.
Francisca Orellana Polanka is a Chilean-American anthropologist, writer, and independent researcher whose work focuses on children’s literature, Indigenous knowledge systems, cultural representation, and decolonial approaches to education and storytelling. Her research examines how literature and visual culture shape childhood understandings of identity, belonging, race, language, and cultural authority. She is the founder of Oveja Negra Kids, an independent publishing initiative dedicated to multilingual and culturally grounded educational materials for children. Her current work explores the intersections of childhood, religion, representation, and Indigenous and diasporic identities.
Simmonds, Joseph
The Brain and the Beast: A Wrinkle in Time and the Delights of Dependence
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is widely read as an exaltation of individuality. It is a novel in which children triumph over the forces of darkness by refusing to conform. However, L’Engle’s child protagonists are only empowered to do so by depending on figures of authority: adults, angels, and aliens who invite the children’s submission using language that is strikingly similar to that of the novel’s tyrannical antagonist. L’Engle invites readers to ask what, if anything, distinguishes oppressive power from empowering authority, and her answer is rooted in a distinctly Christian worldview. This paper argues that A Wrinkle in Time offers a compelling vision of dependence as potentially linking, legitimate, liberating, and loving, if modelled on the relationship of dependence that lies at the heart of the Christian imagination—the relationship that all human beings are invited to enjoy with their Creator. Against a tendency in children’s literature criticism to view the child as hopelessly compromised by dependence, this paper suggests that dependence lies at the heart of what it means to be a fulfilled human. From this perspective, what many see as the greatest problem with the children’s literature genre may in fact be one of its greatest strengths.
Joseph Simmonds is a British-Canadian-American scholar pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Cambridge. His work seeks to develop and critique the metaphors that are used to structure thinking about the function of children’s literature in publishing, education, and criticism. Born in England and raised in Siberia and Prince Edward Island, he enjoys exploring how faith and imagination meet in storytelling traditions from around the world. His creative writing has been recognized with the Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Literature for Children Award, and he is the author of Boy Afloat: Kayaking Solo Around Prince Edward Island.
Tardif, Stephen
Exiled Prophet: The Child in Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”
The main themes of our conference come together in one of the richest—if most perplexing—poems of British Romanticism, William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The poem has been puzzled over as much as praised, and one demurring tradition questions the hierophantic terms in which the Child in the poem is addressed: “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!”
My presentation will address this aspect of the Ode in two stages. The first traces the “genealogy” of the Child’s appearance; although there are references to children in the stanzas composed in 1802, no Child actually appears. Instead, the poet, believing he is continuous with his past self, simply feels deprived of nature’s once-numinous appearance. The completed poem adopts a different view, placing a definitive caesura between the poet’s past and present selves. In the Ode’s latter stanzas—to quote its subsequent epigraph—the Child becomes “Father of the Man.”
As the Child shifts from being a past self to a present father, new horizons open for the poet. In addition to the eponymous “intimations of immortality,” Wordsworth develops an empathetic vision of the fading of childhood’s celestial light. For the Child who remembers a state of spiritual pre-existence is, finally, something of an orphan, a foundling marooned on the far side of the “Immortal Sea.” Thus does the poem conclude with a conciliating vision in which human affections, natural beauty, and supernatural instincts find a balance in the understanding that Wordsworth extends to the world-accommodating, norm-acclimating Child.
Stephen Tardif is an Assistant Professor at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto where he teaches in the Christianity & Culture Program. His scholarly work has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Religion & Literature, and Religion and the Arts. He serves as the co-editor of The Hopkins Quarterly.
Ullman, Alydia
The Uncontrollability of Fairyland: Resonance and Receptivity in George MacDonald’s Romances
Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World (2020), though not a religious or theological text, deserves faithful exploration by Christians who seek to preserve their imagination, spiritual sensitivity, and authentic relationship with the world in the “age of AI.” Rosa argues that modernity’s obsession to control the world paradoxically distorts it so that modernity “stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of self” (28). Rosa offers “resonance” – a mode of receptivity that does not seek to control but exists in dynamic relation with people and things – as an alternative which makes self-knowledge and fulfilling relationships possible. This paper wants to put Rosa’s concept of “resonance” in conversation with children’s literature to show how the imaginative act that occurs in young readers kindles something “uncontrollable” and can therefore engender a state of affectiveness, self-efficacy, and transformation within the individual and deeper connection with his or her world. This paper will then show how George MacDonald’s fairy-romances Phantastes and Lilith illustrate this concept of “resonance” both in the protagonist who must learn receptivity and self-gift during his adventure and in the reader who walks along the same formative journey. In the end, this paper hopes that by introducing a contemporary sociologist like Rosa into a conversation about Christian imagination and formation, a more accessible or even shared language can begin to take shape around the threats that rapid technological control poses to the unquantifiable and uncontrollable aspects of relational human experience.
Alydia C. Ullman is anMLitt Student in Imagination, Theology, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews.
Vassiloudi, Vassiliki
Neither Foreign nor Domesticated: Non-Fiction Knowledge, Evangelical Ideology, and the Paradoxes of the Greek Child’s Paper (1868–1893)
The Greek Child’s Paper (1868–1893) occupies a singular position in the history of Greek children’s publishing: an evangelical periodical sustained by American missionary funding in a country where Orthodox Christianity was constitutive of national identity. Situated within a transnational network of religion-driven periodical adaptations (Chen 2019; Duan et al. 2024; Huang et al. 2024), the magazine ran for nearly three decades, negotiating between foreign evangelical imperatives and the educational and entertainment expectations of its young Greek readership. This study argues that this negotiation produced a hybrid cultural artifact —neither straightforwardly foreign nor fully domesticated— whose internal tensions are most visible in its treatment of non-fiction knowledge. Specifically, this paper asks how knowledge related to nature, science, and non-Christian cultures is constructed and presented, both visually and discursively, and how this construction simultaneously serves educational, religious, and imperialist purposes (Chen 2024; Lihua & Hai 2024).
Employing a new historicist approach through close reading of a representative corpus of issues sampled across the magazine’s long publication run, the analysis reveals four interconnected paradoxes: the fashioning of a child reader who is simultaneously curious and disciplined; an uneasy subordination of empirical inquiry to theological ends; an implicit alignment with the imperialist project of American missionary societies alongside genuinely localizing gestures; and a blending of the rigid Protestant image of childhood with its Romantic counterpart. The study contributes to the history of children’s periodicals and the cultural politics of missionary publishing by demonstrating how such adaptations produce not simple instruments of ideological imposition but complex, contradictory texts that resist straightforward categorization.
Vassiliki Vassiloudi is Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature at the University of Crete, Greece. Her main research interests include the theory and history of children’s literature, historical fiction, diaspora/mobility narratives, children’s magazines, adaptations, metafiction and materiality. Her work has appeared in various Greek and international journals. She has authored the monograph The Child’s Paper (1868-1893): Children’s Magazines and the Protestant Ideal of Childhood (in Greek). She recently convened the 20th international conference “The Child and the Book” which addressed the topic of “Diaspora(s), Exile, Nomads and Children’s Literature”, May 29 – June 1, 2026, Rethymnon, Crete, Greece.
Wakely-Mulroney, Katherine
Agency and Awe: The Legacy of Early Children’s Books in Modern Publishing
Child agency has become a popular topic in children’s literature studies, reflecting a wide-scale reconsideration of theories concerning adult primacy that shaped the field in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This critical shift reflects trends in the children’s book market, where young people are celebrated as autonomous actors capable of changing the world through climate activism, racial justice, and other meaningful causes. Focussing on works by writers including James Janeway and Anna Letitia Barbauld, I show how early religious books for children enshrined the belief that little readers have the potential to achieve great things and that children’s literature is an appropriate site for negotiating complex ideas.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century child death narratives, catechisms, and hymns urged young people to take responsibility for their souls before it was too late, their accessible language and format helping novice readers towards ideas that exceed the limits of human understanding, such as eternity. These works functioned as rallying cries for those who lacked authority in all other areas of their lives (Janeway asked readers of A Token for Children [1671-1672] “how do you know but that you may be the next Child that may die? … Now tell me, my pretty dear Child, What will you do?”). To modern eyes, the emphasis on submission and damnation in early religious books appears harsh and authoritative. They nonetheless gave rise to a conviction at the heart of children’s publishing today, framing young people and the books they read as powerful agents of change.
Katherine Wakely-Mulroney is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is the author of The Origins of Children’s Literature, 1658-1834 (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press). Her work has appeared in journals including The Review of English Studies, Book History, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality and in Small Things in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press). She is the co-editor, with Louise Joy, of The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry (Routledge, 2018).
Winters, Sarah
Christianity and the Imagination in Philip Pullman’s Dust Books
My paper explores Pullman’s six Dust books, marketed for children but crossing over to young adults and adult readers, in the context of Christian thought about the imagination. The Republic of Heaven in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) is replaced by the Kingdom of the Imagination (that is, “the inner kingdom”) in his Book of Dust trilogy (2017-2025). The hero Lyra is no longer a child in the fifth and sixth Dust Books and, in an extraordinary change from the first trilogy in which growing up is represented as a growth in insight and consciousness, she loses her imagination, sinking into depression and despair. This contradictory view of childhood and adulthood stems from Pullman’s ambivalence towards Christianity, which he represents as hostile to the imagination and yet constantly draws inspiration from at the level of imagery, symbolism, and ethics.
The paper’s main argument is that while His Dark Materials portrayed the enemies of imagination to be the forces of organized religion, The Book of Dust portrays them as the anti-religious forces of money and technology. I read The Book of Dust alongside Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine (2025) to show that Pullman’s anti-Christian imagination in His Dark Materials transforms, apparently unintentionally, into a Christian imagination in The Book of Dust.
Sarah Fiona Winters is associate professor of English at Nipissing University where she teaches children’s literature. Her research examines the construction of evil in postwar fantasy for children, and her publications include work on J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Suzanne Collins, and Margaret Mahy.