Remembering the Future: Science Fiction and the Emerging Art of Dialogue Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dialogue Theology, established in June of 2012 as an interdisciplinary stream in the Master of Arts in Spiritual Disciplines and Ministry Practices in the Faculty of Theology of The University of Winnipeg, may best be defined as “the art and discipline of bringing Christian theology into intentional conversation with other religions and worldviews for the sake of ‘mending the world.’” Dialogue theology is inspired by the groundbreaking work of luminaries in the mold of Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong, and by pivotal thinkers of the stature of Hannah Arendt who wrote, “We are most human when we are in dialogue.” The intersection of science fiction, ethics and theology/religious studies is obvious: science fiction is the closest modern and postmodern analogy to biblical prophecy extant. From Heinlein’s “If This Goes On . . .” to Herbert’s Dune to McCarthy’s The Road, the references are legion. In addition to this inherent prophetic tendency, Robert Sawyer has enhanced the dialogue around the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Rarely has one practitioner addressed so cogent a theme in so many intriguing, engaging and significant ways. From our deep roots in Hominids, Humans and Hybrids to a startling future in Calculating God; from the quandaries of the techno-human spectrum in Mind Scan to the evolution of intelligence in Wake, Watch and Wonder, Sawyer opens up new dimensions of dialogue with science and society for the theologian. This paper will employ Sawyer’s work in an attempt to advance the observation of Sri Jawaharlal Nehru at the opening of the then Ceylon Academy of Science in 1961, that “The time is past for politics and religion; the time has come for science and spirituality.”
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 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 | 0.019 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.117 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".