Finding an answer to child soldiers

When I was at Calvin College and hung around some with some philosophy majors, we used to joke about what they'd do when they'd get out of college. "Open a philosophy shop" was a common suggestion.

Keeping up with events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I served in Peace Corps from 1982-86, has led me to one life after college for a philosophy major that none of us had ever considered: Edward Rackley works as a consultant to international agencies operating in conflict and post-conflict contexts, primarily in Africa. In a posting on his blog entitled No shame for the shameless, he says, "As most of you know, I've been working with child soldiers in the DR Congo most of this year."

Edward Rackley's blog is called Across the divide: analysis & anecdote from Africa and he has another article about the eastern Congo called Lawlessness and Lucre in Eastern Congo.

Finding an answer to child soldiers and what creates them is certainly one of the great spiritual challenges of our time. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere of "the great men who built up the Middle Ages", and one of the things they did was to limit war and who took part in it. We need to create our own limits, but this time we need to do it so that it applies for wars with other races and ethnic groups as well, something Europe in the Middle Ages never got to.

Rackley mentions reading P.W. Singers' Children at War. I checked and it's available in our local libraries here in West Michigan. It on my to-read list.