A Cry for Justice in Hymnody: A Plenary Address to the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Samford University., Birmingham, Alabama, July 13, 2010 Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. Eut let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5:23-24 NRSV) Justice is not a peripheral issue in scripture. Justice is not in the margins. It is a central theme. The way we treat people, the planet, and ourselves is important. Our faith makes a positive ~ JTe re nee in the world when we do justice. The words we sing inside and outside of our places of worship can be powerful agents of change. How are we currently singing about have we failed to write about, publish, select, and sing? If you are like me, you will sing the truth before you say it. Give me a good tune, and I'll sing anything. Early in his career, John Wesley was told, Preach faith until you have it. Then, because you have it, you will preach faith. Can we sing ourselves to The work for this project began with a question: What are we already singing about justice? To answer it, Eileen M. Johnson and I decided to look at justice -related texts in current hymnals. We compiled a list of twenty North American hymnals representing a variety of Christian faith traditions, from evangelical to Unitarian/Universalist. We read the topical indexes in each of the hymnals, and selected the subject which related to justice for creation, for children, for the elderly, for women, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered persons, for people with disabilities, for the poor and oppressed, and for people of other faith traditions. Once we identified the topics, Eileen cataloged all the individual hymn texts in each topic in a database. The Tally of topical index entries (see p. 17) summarizes the data and gives a tally, by hymnal, of the number of hymns included for each topic. The texts I present here all pertain to justice: for creation, for children, for the elderly, for women, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered persons, for people with disabilities, for the poor and oppressed, and for people of other faith traditions. I invited a number of my colleagues in The Hymn Society to share some of their relevant texts with me, several of which have not yet found their way into major hymnals. In 1984 Ruth Duck wrote the following text, which appears in four of the hymnals in our database. It beautifully addresses a number of the themes we will be exploring. We cannot own the sunlit sky, the moon, the wild-flow'rs growing, for we are part of all that is within life's river flowing. With open hands receive and share the gifts of God's creation, that all may have abundant life in ev'ry earthly nation. When bodies shiver in the night and, weary, wait for morning, when children have no bread but tears, and war-horns sound their warning, God calls humanity to wake, to join in common labor, that all may have abundant life in oneness with their neighbor. God calls humanity to join as partners in creating a future free from want and fear, life's goodness celebrating. That new world beckons from afar, invites our shared endeavor, that all may have abundant life and peace endure forever. Ruth Duck, 1984, 1989 © 1992 GIA Publications, Inc. Used by permission. Justice for Hymns on the theme of are very popular. In fact, the topic heading creation contains the most in the database. When we started this project, naturally, one of the things we wanted to know was which hymns would appear in the most books. We were quite surprised to find the following hymns were Mm the top ten: Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, For the beauty of the earth, All creatures of our God and king, All things bright and beautiful, and Morning has broken. …
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".