The Making of a Reflective Practitioner of Mission: What Shaped the Author of Christianity Rediscovered
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Vincent Donovan is best known for his best-selling Christianity Rediscovered (1978, 2003), frequently cited in discussions of the mission of the church in the post-Christendom West. His recently published letters from Tanzania between 1957 and 1973 shed new light on the man and his development. This article identifies some of the influences that shaped Donovan: firstly, the significance of the changing political face of Africa at that time, and how it led Donovan to question what this meant for the future of missions in Africa. Secondly, there were ecclesial influences. One was the character of his Order (the Spiritans) which found a fresh opportunity to experiment with enculturation when a new diocese was founded in Arusha in 1963, led by a Spiritan bishop. The other ecclesial influence was that of Vatican II, to which Spiritans contributed and which (they felt) affirmed their direction – though they also felt it did not go far enough. Thirdly, the letters show Donovan’s personal development from his arrival in Africa in 1957 as a naïve young missionary to the seasoned missiologist concerned “to fill the flesh and blood of Africa with the soul of Christianity” whose story is told in Christianity Rediscovered .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
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 it