The Child Snatched Away: Reading Revelation Through a Childist Lens

A great deal of biblical interpretation over the past 30 years has focused upon imagery related to women in the book of Revelation. Very little scholarship has discussed children in Revelation, likely because there are very few in the Apocalypse. However, the limited passages in which children are present deserve to be examined with a focus upon the child. This article will discuss two passages in Revelation which refer to children, Rev. 2:18–29 and Rev. 12:1–5, with the latter receiving greater attention. I will analyze these passages using childist interpretation, building upon Kathleen Gallagher Elkins’s study of feminist and childist interpretation, which uses Rev. 12 as a case study to apply both methods to the same text. Imperial-critical reading will enhance the interpretation of these passages. As I discuss Rev. 12, I will also compare the myth of three Greek child gods, Apollo, Dionysius, and Persephone, to the child snatched away in Rev. 12:5, to understand more fully how this child fits within the overall message of Revelation.

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a text-to-give campaign in Greece. Donations did not increase with an appeal to the in-group (Greek child) relative to a control (child), but they were halved with reference to a stigmatized out-group (Roma child). An appeal to fundamental rights, a common advocacy strategy, did not reduce the generosity gap. Donations to all groups were lower near Roma communities and declined disproportionately for the Roma appeal. Qualitative research in 12 communities complements our experiment. We conclude that NGO fundraising strategies that narrowly emphasize either in-groups or out-groups, or fundamental rights language, may not be as effective as broader appeals, and we discuss implications for public goods provision in an era of growing nationalism.

Discrimination against Fathers in Greek Child Custody Proceedings: Failing the Child’s Best Interests

Greek family courts routinely favour mothers in child custody proceedings even in cases where residence with the father would clearly be in the best interests of the child. This discrepancy between the law and judicial practice is justified by the courts on alleged bio-social grounds but these have never been identified, let alone elaborated in any way and no theory from the field of neuroscience or developmental psychology has ever been cited as the groundwork for the courts’ approach. This arbitrariness and the concomitant absence of legal certainty stems from the absence of a dedicated family court system. As a result, generalist judges are fearful of expressing themselves in non-legal areas, such as neuroscience, or otherwise have little awareness of developments in these areas. Because judgments never make any scientific pronouncements, litigants cannot challenge the courts on scientific grounds. This gender bias has its roots also in taboo theory. With minor exceptions, experts universally agree that attachment theory is gender-neutral and that children, especially infants, form meaningful primary attachments to the person who provides them with a loving and caring environment. Ultimately, in many cases custody arrangements lead to financial bartering in exchange for additional visitation time by the father or exclusion of the father from the child’s life. The injurious nature of such an outcome is analysed here from a neuroscience perspective.