By Desmond Tutu, Douglas Carlton Abrams
Desmond Tutu telling very small children what he thinks God wants, which turns out to be almost nothing about religion and almost everything about how you treat the person next to you.
Tutu took the argument he'd spent a lifetime making to adults and shrank it down for a four-year-old. God's dream, he says, is that we reach out and hold each other's hands, and that we work out we're all brothers and sisters, whatever our way of talking to God, whatever the shape of our nose, whatever the shade of our skin. LeUyen Pham draws children of every color doing ordinary things and then falling out and then sorting it out. It's short, it's said in the plainest possible words, and it never asks your child to believe any particular thing.
This is the one you give when you don't know the family's church. Tutu was an Anglican archbishop and the book has God in the title, so it belongs on a milestone shelf without any argument, and yet there's no doctrine in it, no sacrament, no scripture, nothing that assumes your child's family does things a particular way. It's about all people on purpose, which was rather Tutu's entire position. So it survives being handed to a Catholic family, a Methodist family, a family who go twice a year, and a family you've never asked. The trade-off is that it's short and pitched young, so it does its work in about four minutes and a nine-year-old will feel talked down to.