Textual Erasures of Religion: The Power of Books to Redefine Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation as Secular Wellness Practices in North American Public Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay argues that books, broadly defined to include print and internet publications, played a crucial role in the cultural mainstreaming, including adoption by public schools, of non-Christian religious practices such as yoga and meditation. Promotional books, tactically and ironically, played on the textual bias of Christianity, and especially Protestantism, to re-brand practices borrowed from religious traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, as scientific techniques for exercise and stress-reduction, thereby reintegrating religion into public education. The essay begins with a brief history of religion in U.S. and Canadian public education, explains the textual bias of North American assumptions about religion, and analyzes how twentieth-century promoters of practice-centered religions tactically wielded books to increase public acceptance of non-Christian religious practices. The essay focuses on two twenty-first-century examples of religion-based, textually mediated public-school curricula: the Sonima Foundation’s Health and Wellness program of Ashtanga yoga and The Hawn Foundation’s MindUP program of mindfulness meditation.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".