<b>Atonement Theories</b>: <b>A Way through the Maze</b>, Ben Pugh, James Clarke, 2015 (ISBN 978‐0‐227‐17500‐2), xiv + 190 pp., pb £20
Bibliographic record
Abstract
But all of this really serves to lay the foundation for Potts's masterful discussion of The Road in his final chapter.In it he draws together the threads from his previous chapters to present a theologically coherent account of sacramental imagery and narrative technique.Drawing once more on Karl Barth, Potts also engages with Hans Frei, Michel de Certeau, Rowan Williams, Louis-Marie Chauvet, and Johann Baptist Metz without ever giving the impression that they all offer the same account or that Mc-Carthy would subscribe to any of their individual beliefs.He does, however, link them into a chain leading from the identity of Christ to issues of signification and dispossession and finally to the sacraments, or better yet to love.And it is love, characterized by dispossessionrisking the self in vulnerability to suffering and violencethat offers McCarthy's characters the chance to reject the very violence that threatens to destroy their worlds.Yet, this does not negate the clear rejections of religion found within the novels nor does it relieve the tragedy inherently linked to the morality they contain.Rather, Potts convincingly argues; it is through sacramental theology that we can make sense of the 'tragedies, rejections, misgivings, and moralities in a uniquely intelligible way' and further that 'this theology is indubitably appealed to by McCarthy's imagery' (p.187).This meticulously thought-out and presented discussion of the sacramentality within the works of Cormac McCarthy is both engaging and convincing, leaving me to wonder how McCarthy scholars will respond to the insights and analysis Potts has taken such great care to lay out.Regardless of whether those scholars agree or disagree with Potts, they certainly must engage with him, as his reading of McCarthy suggests shortcoming in much of what has already been written.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.007 |
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".