That's Not How Scholarship Works Preston
Episode 1: Jesus Magic Doesn't Mean You Don't Have Bias
A few months ago Preston Sprinkle posted a video/podcast of a conversation he had with Paul Eddy about a 2022 paper Eddy published for Sprinkle’s Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender . I found out about it as I was driving to a summer professional development training and my first thought was “well I am definitely going to have to listen to that one”. I have been working on a slow and (I hope) thorough chapter by chapter review of Sprinkle’s book about trans people and have been trying to also stay on top of Sprinkle’s ongoing engagement with trans-ness. Suspecting that the episode would generate a range of reactions in the affirming Christian corners of the Internet I tweeted that I had seen the topic of the episode and would be listening and responding after my training. My friend Celeste also so the episode and listened to it (both of us initially listened to the podcast version) and by the time I had finished listening through I knew that she and I needed to talk.
Sprinkle and Eddy make a lot of claims in their video and the the paper they are discussing in it and we could tell right off that untangling and contextualizing what Sprinkle and Eddy were saying was going to take a lot of work. In the end we decided to turn it into a reaction style video series.
Celeste has taken the lead on this and done all of the work of hosting the conversation (as well as providing her own wisdom and insight), planning and scheduling us, and doing all of the video editing. I am so grateful to her that we have this opportunity to respond in a new medium to Sprinkle and Eddy’s misleading and distorted claims about transition, detransition, desistance, and trans people generally. Below you will find PART 1 of the series which is posted on Celeste’s YouTube Channel.