Excerpt from "The Obscenity of Belief in an Eternal Hell” by David Bentley Hart

My friends’ son is now old enough to grant me permission to tell this story, but it happened more than a dozen years ago, when he was only seven or eight. The year before, he had been diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome. He was an extremely intelligent child, shy, typically gentle and quiet, but occasionally emotionally volatile — as tends to be the case with many children classified as “on the spectrum”. They are often intensely sensitive to, and largely defenceless against, extreme experiences: crowds, loud noises, overwhelming sensory stimulation of any kind, but also pronounced imaginative, affective, or moral dissonances.