The secular masks of religion: A (re) constructive critique of W. D. Hart's Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the late 1970s, much scholarly interest has been generated by Edward Said's Orientalism. More recently, some scholarly attention has been devoted towards understanding Said's view of religion. One such example is W. D. Hart's Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. This article aims to show that Hart's reading of Said's œuvre is not only partial, but also largely uncharitable and therefore inadequate. Two major problems of Hart's book are the focus of attention: first, that according to Hart, Said was only negative in regards to religion, and second, that, again according to Hart, Said thought religion and secularism could not be fruitfully allied. To correct these two erroneous views, six theses based on Said's writings are proposed as correctives. In offering the correctives this article provides a more nuanced account of Said's views of religion based on the understanding that Said expressed his thoughts concerning religion on two relatively distinct discursive levels: one metaphorical, the other concrete. To illustrate this, the article examines an example of Said's metaphorical reflections concerning nationalism as religious, and conversely, of exile as secularity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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".