Charles Gerkin's Practical Theology: A Qualitative Study of Theological Reflection in the Praxis of Pastoral Care and Counselling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charles Gerkm (1922-2005) was an American practical theologian and a United Methodist clergy. He taught for over twenty years at Candler Theological School at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Gerkin was also a chaplain, pastoral counsellor and family therapist, serving. as chaplain at the Boys Industrial Home in Topeka, Kansas and then Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia before teaching at Emory in the late 1960s. He published numerous articles and five books. Gerkin believed that practical theology ought to be rooted in praxis. His practical theology was based in the praxis of pastoral care and counselling. Praxis, for Gerkin, is the critical reflection on practice with the assumption that all practice is theory laden, and he identified his praxis as a narrative hermeneutical approach. He argued that practical theology has its own theological methods and is not applied systematic theology. In fact, Gerkin was against any applied theory, be it theological or social scientific. Applied theory, in his view, was reductionistic in that it reduced the practice of ministry to the categories of a particular theory. For Gerkin, there was always more to experience in a case or a pastoral situation than anyone theory could adequately explain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".