Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Coles, Robert - Laura Sessions Stepp (review date 23 December 1990)

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Laura Sessions Stepp (review date 23 December 1990)

SOURCE: "Faith of Our Children," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XX, No. 51, December 23, 1990, p. 5.

[In the following review, Stepp considers some of the observations on spirituality Coles elicited from children in his study of the subject in The Spiritual Life of Children.]

During his first 25 years of interviewing and writing about children, Robert Coles managed to sidestep their persistent religious questions.

Despite hints from his young subjects that they would like to travel that road of inquiry with him, Coles focused on topics more in line with his secular training in psychiatry at Harvard. In books including the five-volume Children of Crisis, he produced rich documentaries of children living through desegregation, children coming to grips with their Hispanic or Native American heritage, children both blessed and cursed with wealth.

But questions such...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Melvin J. Friedman (review date Fall 1982)
   2. Neil Postman (review date 19 January 1986)
   3. Katherine Paterson (review date 2 February 1986)
   4. Jonathan Kellerman (review date 9 February 1986)
   5. New Yorker (review date 10 February 1986)
   6. John Leo (review date 17 March 1986)
   7. Kenneth L. Woodward (review date 6 September 1987)
   8. Jeff Dietrich (review date 13 September 1987)
   9. Fitzhugh Mullan (review date 8 May 1988)
   10. Helen Bevington (review date 26 February 1989)
   11. Francis X. Rocca (review date March 1989)
   12. Iain Bamforth (review date 7-13 July 1989)
   13. Sanford Pinsker (essay date Summer 1989)
   14. Herbert Mitgang (review date 21 November 1990)
   15. Laura Sessions Stepp (review date 23 December 1990)
   16. The New Yorker (review date 7 January 1991)
   17. Virginia C. Hoch (review date 26 August-2 September 1992)
   18. A. J. S. (review date 1993)
   19. Michelle Huneven (essay date 3 October 1993)
   20. Robert A. Sirico (review date 15 November 1993)
   21. Gail Russell Chaddock (review date 9 December 1993)
   22. Ed Walraven (essay date 1994)
   23. Paulina F. Kernberg (review date October 1994)
   24. Richard Bernstein (review date 27 January 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright