The church as one cradle for compassion: Formative, interactive processes of compassion in the context of meaningful relationships and rich experiences according to school-age children.

摘要

Children in the church, whose theology suggests God's love and compassion in the form of Christ's incarnation, life, death and resurrection, represent hope to reformulate a compassionate American lifestyle. The children in this study comprehend the concept of compassion, identified needs for compassion not only for physical and social/psychological pain, but also for spiritual pain. They reported formative, interactive processes of compassion, including observing, receiving, recognizing the need for, responding to and rehearsing acts of compassion within the context of relationships and experiences.;Children have been viewed historically as immoral, amoral, premoral and most recently almost as supra-moral which has invited an emerging recognition of children as capable moral actors. Moral and spiritual formation are believed to be inseparable and spiritual formation views have followed a similar pattern. Earlier research was norm-seeking and flowed from a focus on moral habits of character to cognition to emotion and recent research with adolescents points to the role of transcendence and fidelity as contributing to spiritual formation and prosocial behavior. Recent cognitive neuroscience findings compel new research on the integration of emotion and cognition, or emotional thought, displayed in children's unique influences of relationships and experience with compassion.;Little moral research has been conducted on children in the church (as opposed to adolescents) and most of that was without the cognitive neuroscience lens. This research uses a qualitative approach to describe the formative, interactive processes in the contexts of relationship and experiences and pedagogical strategies compassionate Christian children, ages 6--11 in the church in the United States, report in the formation of compassion as validated by their parents and teachers.;The central research issue is to use a qualitative approach to describe the interactive, developmental processes of relationships, experiences and pedagogical strategies in the formation of compassion. How do children understand compassion, how do they recognize the need for compassion, can they respond to those needs and how do adults, with whom they have a close relationship, facilitate their rehearsal, or reinforcing of the lessons learned from those compassionate action experiences.