Criticizing "secular criticism": Reading religion in Edward Said and Kathryn Tanner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the forefront of cultural studies, Edward Said has directed an influential critique of religious discourse. In its place he has proposed "secular criticism." In the first part of this essay I will analyze Said's critique of religious discourse and his alternative to it. Then, turning from the work of Edward Said to that of Kathryn Tanner, I will develop her account of belief in a transcendent God and its potential to create a self-critical and open-ended set of cultural practices. Essential to Said's argument is the claim that religious discourse cannot engender self-critical cultural practices. By juxtaposing Tanner's account of belief in a transcendent God with Said's criticism of religious discourse I will address this claim in two ways. First, I will show that Said's understanding of religious discourse is incomplete and, therefore, mistaken. Second, and more importantly for people who wish to retrieve the critical potential of religious discourse, Tanner's proposals will serve as an example of how one can both speak from within a religious tradition and advocate self-critical cultural practices.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".