Book Review: Aging Matters: Finding Your Calling for the Rest of Your Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aging Matters: Finding Your Calling for the Rest of Your Life. By R. Paul Stevens. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2016.193 pp. $16.00 (paper).What is a calling? Is it different in the years from ages sixty to ninety? How does the journey evolve as we age? How should we face the progressive losses that occur in later life? What is our legacy to be? Does scripture offer special insights for the second half of life? What does God ask of us at this stage? What special joys and challenges does the Christian life present to an elder adult?These are the deep and rich questions presented in Aging Matters: Finding Your Calling for the Rest of Your Life. R. Paul Stevens, professor emeritus at Regent College in Vancouver, has written numerous books that incorporate marketplace theology, the concept that our faith can and should infuse all aspects of our lives, particularly our secular employment. Having stepped away from fulltime teaching several years ago, Stevens in this book turns his attention to the component of vocation in later life.In 2014,55 percent of members of the Episcopal Church were age fifty and above. While many clergy and congregations are laudably interested in attracting families and millennials, the current reality is that our members (like those of denominations) are aging. Too often, he says, almost all seniors ministry is service to aging rather than service from seniors (pp. 109-110). Our older members offer wisdom from a wider perspective, and the gifts of the later years-mentoring, encouragement, prayer, comfort, and counseling, among others, are in particular need at this time of polarized politics and societal distress. Aquinas's spiritual alms deeds (p. 108) are a useful outline for later fife wisdom and ministry.Stevens draws the reader into a study of the older people in biblical stories and parables, demonstrating how their situations and struggles still resound with us today. The chapters on the vices and virtues of aging ring especially true. We would all recognize others and ourselves in the discussion of aging persons whose pride leads us to recite our ailments and disabilities on the one hand, and boast of our fife achievements on the other (p. 87). And then there is sloth; Stevens perplexingly enough reserves special scorn for the (slothful?) perennial traveler, especially cruise passengers, though one might more generously place them in the category of lifelong learner, which he strongly supports. He explicates faith, hope, and love as those virtues that, retooled by disciplines and the circumstances of the later years, allow us to find deeper meaning in life and especially life with God. …
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.056 | 0.045 |
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".