kw217 reviewed Autism and the Church by Grant Macaskill
Valuable and timely
4 stars
This is a great attempt at a complex and under-discussed subject. So many good ideas and thoughts, and parts of this will be directly useful in our church. Commendably, Macaskill starts with the intention to write for ordinary readers in the main text, reserving academic discussions for the endnotes. He achieves this in the intro and chapter 1, which are excellent and deserve to be a separate book in themselves. Sadly chapter 2 regularly slips from this, and by chapter 3 it's quite academic. Chapter 5 mostly returns to accessibility for ordinary readers, with an odd slip around the word "comorbidity". This is a great pity, because the content is amazing and deserves a wider audience. In my view someone should co-author a popular book with Macaskill based on this material. Really valuable and timely book. The sections in ch1 on autism characteristics and an autistic experience of church alone …
This is a great attempt at a complex and under-discussed subject. So many good ideas and thoughts, and parts of this will be directly useful in our church. Commendably, Macaskill starts with the intention to write for ordinary readers in the main text, reserving academic discussions for the endnotes. He achieves this in the intro and chapter 1, which are excellent and deserve to be a separate book in themselves. Sadly chapter 2 regularly slips from this, and by chapter 3 it's quite academic. Chapter 5 mostly returns to accessibility for ordinary readers, with an odd slip around the word "comorbidity". This is a great pity, because the content is amazing and deserves a wider audience. In my view someone should co-author a popular book with Macaskill based on this material. Really valuable and timely book. The sections in ch1 on autism characteristics and an autistic experience of church alone are worth the price of admission, and the theological and biblical content is eye-opening. I just wish it was a book I could recommend to non-academic readers.