From proclamation to conversation: ethnographic disruptions to theological normativity
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
Abstract In recent years, theologians have increasingly used ethnographic research methods to strengthen the connections between their theological constructions and the social practices they seek to impact. The migration of these methods into the theological context has raised important questions about theological normativity. This essay draws on the author’s fieldwork in a Southern Baptist congregation in Nashville Tennessee to argue that the ethnographic intervention into traditional methods for producing theological knowledge shifts the mode of speech in which normative theological claims can be made from that of proclamation to an anti-hierarchical practice of conversation. The author proposes that ethnographic theologians can use the ethnographic research question to shape the normative weight of sources in the field and what types of normative claims can be made out of that fieldwork in the theological text. She argues that while such a shift in the understanding of theological normativity and, by extension, of theology itself has the potential to threaten methods seeking to preserve the authority of Christian speech in an increasingly post-Christendom context, that this more humble, collaborative approach is better suited to the interfaith, intercultural contexts of contemporary life, all of which face the reality of the contingency of all truth claims, including religious truth claims. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on radical theologies.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it