The Visual Art of Käthe Kollwitz as Practical Theodicy and Its Relevance to Hope in Theoretical Theodicy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some theorists have characterized art that actively engages people in meaningfully religious ways as a form of “practical theology.” This paper analyzes how the visual art of German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) functions as practical theology—with special attention to theodicy—that is, its role as religious response to the realities of suffering and evil. There is a call among some scholars and theologians to abandon all attempts to defend God's love and goodness in the face of destructive evil and suffering (theoretical theodicy), and rather to focus solely on how people ought to respond practically to such realities (practical theodicy). The paper illustrates Kollwitz's work as a powerful and pioneering form of practical theodicy, one that sensitively integrates ethical-feminist and socio-political concerns in stimulating compassion and consolation, supporting positive social change, and invoking theological hope. In proposing the creative integration of practical and theoretical theodicy, it also shows how such practical theodicy depends upon the hope in certain themes of theoretical theodicy.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".