Christianity On The Spectrum

Do we need an autistic liberation theology? (A review of "Peculiar Discipleship")

In this episode, Jon and Christian review a book about liberation theology, specifically autistic liberation theology. We give a fairly thorough review of the book "Peculiar Discipleship: An Autistic Liberation Theology" by Claire Williams. We go through what we liked, what we didn't, things she got right, things she got wrong, and who should read the book.
Alternative title: "Do we need an autistic liberation theology? No (at least not if it is what this book is proposing)"
Alternative title: "An autistic liberation theology that will probably be rejected by most autistic Christians"

Why New Testament Scholars are Wrong about Style in Paul

In this episode, Josiah Leinbach a statistician whose masters thesis covered a Stylostatistical analysis of Paul's Letters, and Jon, a computer engineer whose academic specialty is counter forensics, who has spent a large chunk of his adult life trying to use computational analysis to determine who wrote things on the internet and teaching grad courses on how to do the same thing, team up to explain why New Testament critical scholars are wrong about Stylostatistical analysis being able to show that Paul did or did not write various letters attributed to him.
(if you can't see the graphs from your page, you can see them here https://christianityonthespectrum.podbean.com/e/qa-why-new-testament-scholars-are-wrong-about-style-in-paul/)
Graph of Styles in Paul mentioned by Josiah
 
Graph Jon mentioned:

My Issue with Critical Scholarship

In this episode Jon tries to explain his issues with Critical Scholarship. Admittedly this is a less structured and a more rambling episode, mostly because this is basically two of my special interests colliding which often got me side tracked.
My main issue is that many scholars are saying things with a lot of confidence, and I'm like "IDK, I think things are actually more complicated and historical reconstruction is actually extremely hard to do accurately IRL" and basically say that on a loop for 1:30.
 
Correction: I kept saying "providence" I meant to say provenance" I guess I just had Christianity on the brain a little too much
 

Is there really an autism epidemic? And Surrounding Discourse

This this episode, Jon addresses RFK's recent speech about the supposed autism epidemic, what he got wrong, the real differences between autism prevalence the discourse that has sprung up around it.
 
Live Stream I did with Nathan (Digital Gnosis)
https://www.youtube.com/live/m35jiN-7J7M
 
Papers cited:
https://www.dovepress.com/prevalence-of-autism-in-scandinavian-countries-denmark-norway-sweden-a-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-NDT
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1961
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00333549231163551
 

The Problem with Christian Slavery Apologetics

In the last episode, Jon talked about why autistic people often get disillusioned and annoyed with Apologetics and many people reached out to ask about a specific example that could be used to illustrate these points.
This episode tries to give a specific example of the problem with apologetics for autistic people to follow-up to the previous episode by talking about Christian Complicity in Slavery. Jon tries to explain why slavery apologetics are often not convincing to autistic people, often backfire, and then uses his experience talking about this subject with autistics to suggest a possible solution.
 
The Gavin Ortlund Video that I reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZImmDmr8pxk
 
Books Mentioned:
Slavery in Early Christianity – Jennifer A Glancy
Slavery in the Late Roman World AD 275-425 – Kyle Harper
Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World – Katharine Gerbner
From Shame to Sin: Transformation of Sexual Ethics in Late Antiquity – Kyle Harper
 
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Autism and Apologetics

In this episode, Jon, a Computer Engineer that studies and researches the intersection between autism and Christianity, talks about the weird and unique relationship between autism and apologetics, why we like it, why we hate it, why so many of us have an apologetics phase, why a lot of us become disillusioned, by analyzing data from over 26000 online autistics and over 500 long form interviews with Christian and ex-Christian autistics.
 
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Autistic Clergy, Monks, Nuns, etc

In this episode, Jon talks about his research on autistic Christians to answer questions about autistic clergy, monks, nun, consecrated virgins, missionaries and others. He talks about why they take religious vocations, the good aspects and the bad ones as well.
 
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Is Calling Yourself Autistic Bad? And other related questions.

In this episode, Jon, and autistic autism researcher attempts to address a wide host of questions about autism and autistic identity using research from over 26000 online autistics and over 500 long form interviews:
Should you identify as autistic?
Is calling yourself autistic bad?
Is self Diagnosis harmful?
Is autism 1, asperger's, or high functioning autism fake autism? and more
 
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Autism and Christian Cults

In this episode Jon and Alyssa talk about why so many autistic people get caught up in Christian Cults, how cults work, why autistic people find them so appealing, what happens when they join and what happens when they leave.
 
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Autism and Christian Fundamentalism

In this episode, Jon an autistic computer engineer and autism researcher tries to explain all of the interesting intersections between fundamentalism and Autistic Christians to Alyssa using data pulled from over 26000 online autistics and interviews with over 500 autistic Christians and ex-Christians.
 
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