“Toilet-seat Prayers” and Impious Fathers: Interrogating Religion and the Family in Oral Histories of the Postwar Pacific Northwest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the place and meaning of religion within families during the post-World War II years. It draws selected examples from two completed oral history projects, one that focused on the nature of church life in Victoria, British Columbia, and another which examined the discourses and practices of secularism in the Pacific Northwest. Although they were conducted for different projects, both sets of interviews reveal the centrality of family to religious (and irreligious) practice and identity in postwar North America. Such moments also suggest that family religion often involved contestation and uncertainty, and that it was lived in ways that cannot be easily fit into discrete, either/or categories such as sacred/secular, elite/popular, or clergy/lay. The analytic concept of lived religion, which seeks to break down entrenched dualisms, offers a useful framework for understanding the complexity of family religion. This article argues that, despite the challenges it presents, oral history is especially useful for at least partly illuminating the complicated, disorderly way that religion was lived within families in the past.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".