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22 Advocacy

Autistic Exclusion at Churches

I've written and talked about how churches are often among the most unwelcoming places for disabled folks. HERE is an excellent post on how churches often make autistics feel unwelcome. While this may be unintentional, that doesn't mean it's not a problem. In my experience,…
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August 20, 2021
22 Advocacy

IEP training meeting handout

Earlier this summer, I advocated for a local family. They'd been stonewalled repeatedly by their local public school district and got my name from a FB group. We had a five hour IEP meeting where I was able to help the family get nearly everything…
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July 12, 2021
22 Advocacy

Requiring dehumanization as the means to support

David Perry has again written something absolutely fabulous, about how our social systems require us to think of, quantify, and characterize disabled children in order to get support. Over the past few nights, I've been slowly working through the Vineland-3 Adaptive Behavior Scale, which is…
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March 9, 2021
22 Advocacy

Isolation

My friend Ellen Stumbo recently wrote this excellent post, which unfortunately captures so much of our experience. I strongly recommend you read the whole post. But here's a taste: Over time, as my two children with disabilities have become older, the isolation has continued to…
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February 9, 2021
22 AdvocacyUncategorized

A Sibling’s Perspective

Our kids are in the "love Lego" stage of life (which I hope they never grow out of). For the past few years, we've given them Lego Advent calendars, which they greatly enjoy. This year, we got them one and my parents got them another.…
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December 14, 2020
22 Advocacy

IEPs and CLPs (Contingency Learning Plans)

Earlier this week, the Michigan Department of Education released this document with guidance following MI's Return to Learn Roadmap specifically for students with IEPs. As a number of articles have pointed out, many disabled students seem to have been disproportionately disadvantaged by the switch to…
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August 27, 2020
Talks & Lectures

Podcast on Free Will

Last summer, I was able to take an amazing trip to Bogota to be part of this fabulous project, teaching down there for two days. While there, I recorded a podcast about some of my work; you can listen to it here (and find the…
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August 21, 2020
22 AdvocacyBook Reviews

Of Such is the Kingdom

Yesterday I stared reading Summer Kindard's new book, Of Such is the Kingdom: A Practical Theology of Disability. I'm a little over 100 pages in (out of a total of around 260) and so far it's perhaps the best single book I know of on…
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February 16, 2020
22 Advocacy

Inclusive Hymns, Exclusive Language

(This post is related to this earlier one.) I've been thinking about theological/liturgical language a fair bit over the past few days. This past sunday, one of the hymns our church sang was "Be Thou My Vision." It's a hymn that I've liked for a…
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January 7, 2020
22 AdvocacyPapers & Presentations

the start of 2020

I wasn't nearly as regular posting last year as I would have liked. I'm hoping to do better in the coming year. January is going to start off the year with a fair number of speaking engagements. My primary work responsibility is a three-week intensive…
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January 5, 2020
22 AdvocacyTalks & Lectures

God’s Kingdom without Autism

Today, I want to talk about how our culture and communities—and specifically the Christian community known as the Church—are problematic with respect to how we treat disabled people. Just as the Church is sometimes unwelcoming of people that are different than us in other ways,…
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October 3, 2019
22 Advocacy

You want me to sing what?

This past weekend my family was on the road with . me, as I had a number of speaking engagements in another state. We visited a church near where we were staying. During the Sunday morning service, the congregation sang "O for a Thousand Tongues…
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October 1, 2019