Bibliographic record
Abstract
William Closson James. God's Plenty: Religious Diversity in Kingston. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011. 433 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Appendices. $34.95 sc. Reviewing the scholarly work of others is often a task to he dreaded, but in my case, it is an opportunity to broaden horizons. William Closson James has had a long and distinguished career in Religious Studies, while I am an historian of religions. He presents here a snapshot of religion in Kingston, Ontario in the first decade of the 21st century, with minimal historical context. God's Plenty: Religious Diversity in Kingston, comes at the end of Dr. James's professional academic life, but is not, I hope, the last we shall hear from him. To one trained as an historian, this book seems methodologically odd. The primary tool used was interviews with clergy and other representatives of religions in Kingston, following the format of the Pluralism Project begun by Harvard University professor Diana L. Eck. The model used was intended to draw on anthropological technique but seems rather to he more sociological in its use of questionnaires, rather than utilizing participant observation, which lies at the heart of anthropological methodology. Bolstering the interviews is an eclectic mix of rigorously analyzed census data, popular newspaper journalism, non-scholarly web sites, references to religion in literature, and a scattering of sociological and historical scholarship. For example, on page 140, after a good analysis of census data, evidence from the Canadian Press and the Toronto Star is presented without analysis of the sources used. While no doubt good journalists are employed in both places, and no doubt the web sites also referenced throughout the text may have a degree of scholarly rigor, a utility similar to census data cannot be accorded to these type of sources. Prof. James's lack of familiarity with the historical literature led him also to ascribe the so-called evangelical quadrilateral to Sam Reimer, who wrote Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States (2003), rather than to David Bebbington, the British historian of evangelicalism who introduced this definition in his 1989 book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (150). Sociological analysis and theory is mostly drawn from the work of the University of Ottawa sociologist of religion Peter Beyer and from the thirty-year-old, but still useful studies of Hans Mol at McMaster University. The overall impression of the methodology is one of a degree of muddiness. The extensive bibliography is a good mirror to this criticism as scholarly and non-scholarly secondary sources are mingled with primary data. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".