I need to find some time to pause and reflect and prayerfully discern what and where my energies need to go. This blog has become something I never guessed it would be, and it is a little fractured. It is split between posts about autism and posts about Christianity. The image above shows something that …
Category: Autism
Keeping the virtual congregation
How not to lose those who came to virtual services How do we hold on to those who came to our virtual services? The bad news is we can't do it. Some came because their church did not have any online services and when churches open again they will go back. Then there is another …
Spectrum 10k
Is it a good idea? The National Autistic Society (NAS), the self styled UK's leading charity for people on the autism spectrum and their families, has announced a study called Spectrum 10k, launched by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, including the Autism Research Centre, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University …
Why do I fall asleep over coffee?
This is a story of those spiky skill sets that autistic people have. I have already written about there being both more people with both dyslexia and hyperlexia with autism than is found in the general neuro-typical population. Here is another one. Today I drank a coffee again and fell asleep. I keep doing this …
Energy budgeting — disability and autism
This has not been a good week for energy. Two days of doing nothing has been my reward for being busy. Even in my usual routine I get tired. It goes like this: A physical disability causes pain, anything involving walking or standing on crutches gives pain and pain makes me tired.I have type two …
Defining autistic people by upsetting them
I had an experiment. I put the words autism and behaviour into Google and looked at the fist result. This is about how people see us. This in italics below is what I found A child or adult with autism spectrum disorder may have limited, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities, including any of these signs: Performs …
The Gospel takes away our right to discriminate
“The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor.” - Dorothy Day. I love this quote. God's care for the poor is because they are poor nothing else. It cuts across governments whose attitude to immigrants is less than generous, especially those who have signed up to the 1948 …
Continue reading The Gospel takes away our right to discriminate
Formal language and lying in autism
With these words, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," President Bill Clinton condemned himself. It was clearly a lie. The tell of the lie is repeated, what do "did not," "sexual relations," and "that woman" have in common? They are all formal word pairings where "didn't," "sex" and "her" would be more …
Executive function and visual thinking
Some people when asked to imagine a church steeple will imagine something generic pointing up into the air. Me? I would see, in detail, the spire of St Thomas's Longroyd Bridge near here, or again Wakefield Cathedral... now it is Salisbury Cathedral... and now the crooked spire of Chesterfield. Saint Patrick's Cathedral. New YorkPhoto by …
What is the worst that can happen?
The last time I wrote about autism it was about specifically hyperlexia and dyslexia and generally about sensory processing issues. This is about another side of autism, social anxiety. Social anxiety is why you'll always find me in the kitchen at parties, or towards one side of a room or another. It is also why …
Making an ass of myself 