Born Into Violence: Children in the Shadows

Inger Hermann has taught RE to deprived children in three special schools in Stuttgart. These children come from a world of violence, abuse, deprivation, drug addiction and crime. Many of them are refugees from recent conflicts, in the Balkans and elsewhere; they are traumatized and damaged, and their language is foul almost beyond belief. In this book she describes her experiences with them and the way in which, even in these most unpromising of all circumstances, it is possible to help them to ask profound existential questions and even to take stumbling steps in exploring religious belief in God. As the TV announcers sometimes say, her programme ’contains strong language’ and some of the scenes may be distressing to readers. But here is an authentic book about life in the raw, and Inger Hermann’s account in its own way deserves to stand alongside Vincent Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered as a classic document of modern mission.