Beyond Secularism? Rethinking the “Secular” in a Religiously Plural Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In global and inter-religious 21st century North America, lines demarcating sacred and secular are becoming increasingly unstable and problematic. Yet in this lies great potential for rethinking the sacred/secular dilemma. The article argues that, contrary to prominent secularization theories, the secular is a particular kind of social space congenial to sacred traditions, defined not so much by anti- or a-religious ideologies (e.g., secularism or neutrality) as by public and democratic processes of interaction. The task, then, is to outline a framework for understanding and evaluating these kinds of processes. Secularity need not require transferring the authority of sacred claims to non-sacred mediums; rather, it means opening such claims to ongoing public conversations in which contestation and potential redefinition can occur. A third discourse emerges in-between parties that is dialogical and inter-religious in character, wherein continuities are forged amidst differences and the best of what sacred traditions have to offer become salient as means to sharing space.
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.
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 | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".