Textual Erasures of Religion: The Power of Books to Redefine Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation as Secular Wellness Practices in North American Public Schools
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
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it