Autism Consecrated by Aimée O’Connell
Once upon a short while ago, the team at Autism Consecrated was assembling a symposium entitled “Autism Through the Eyes of God,” intended to bring together an array of speakers to inspire and challenge those in attendance to flip our view of autism as a disability and see what it might look like in terms of the gifts each autistic person brings to the faith community. We had just begun to consider location, date and cost when COVID-19 asserted itself as the card holder in all of our affairs, and now we find ourselves looking at an entirely new landscape where public gatherings are concerned. Not only are conferences being postponed indefinitely, but prospective attendees are facing job cuts, loss of work hours and a necessary reshuffling of priorities across the board.
While these new operating parameters take precedence among service providers around the world, the topic of autism in our faith communities is just as relevant, if not more so during times of crisis and uncertainty. Moreover, the shift from real interaction to electronic and virtual contacts in the name of public safety only reinforces the spiritual health benefits we lose when we cannot interact in person. Our hope all along was to create a symposium to share our common goals in the same space. Until that can happen… what can we do?
Do you want to build a library?
We were already planning to upload the “best of” our live symposia talks to our YouTube channel. While we wait for that time when we are able to gather and inspire one another in person, why not enkindle and explore ideas without limits, without cost, and without letting this time of quarantine detract from the passion we carry in our hearts for realizing autism’s belonging in the Body of Christ?
In that spirit, we are opting right now to convert our “Presentations” section to a Clickable Resource Library. In order to build that library, we need content! As such, we are rolling out a Call for Submissions, accompanied by a Release of Information Form, which we will make available in a separate post here and in the Resource Area on the main page of our website.
Whether you have a submission you would like to contribute or a request for a specific topic to be covered, we need your input!
We also need our Call for Submissions shared far and wide in order to get this Resource Library off the ground. Please help us get the word out via email and social media. Download the documents here, or request them by email at autismconsecrated@gmail.com.
Do you want to build a library? Let’s do this!