"The World Leadership Opportunity: Resolved Christianity and One Education System" by Douglas J. Thom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We are two of many Christian academics in Canada.Like other Christian academics, we often feel as if we must tread softly.On one hand, we believe our own belief system helps us explain and live efficaciously in our world-especially the world of education that, when you are a teacher of children and young adults, calls for constant episodes of grace in action.And with humility and when confronted with others of our colleagues with greater insight into areas where we have little understanding, we realize how tolerant we must honestly be.Still, with the cacophony of cosmologies that bubble around us, we constantly hope to be able to applaud apologetics for our own faith.With this in mind, we want to like this book.Alas, we do not.It is not that Thorn's book fails to present a number of ideas worthy of discussion.It is more that the narrowness of the discussion does little to extend the topics discussed.Fortunately, the ideas Thorn grapples with can be found more rigorously addressed in other sources, thus saving readers the time and effort required to go through this book.Sadly, we simply do not recommend Thorn's book as a worthwhile addition to the debate.For the purposes of this review, we look at the pertinent issues first, offer alternative sources a reader may investigate, and then briefly critique the tone, content, and format of Thorn's work.We would spend more time on discussing the book itself, except that we are left with the impression that Thorn's work is little more than an anthology of his past work combined with an introduction to some weighty topics worthy of their own study.Perhaps the aftermath of September 11 leaves each of us, formally or informally, engaged in our first postmodern war.Like any scholar, Christian religious educators grapple with the issues of war, culture, belief, and identity.Most prominent among these are issues of leadership, the role of religious education, and the construction of a caring, just, and faith-filled society: what Christians call building the Kingdom of God.The events of these last months have not changed the topic of discussion; still, they have suddenly expanded the discussion into the wider field of our society.It is painfully evident that we are a people in desperate need of leadership.We can, of course, plaintively bemoan the failures of our elected political leaders, our sports leaders, our entertainment leaders, and our church leaders.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".