Half-Ass Faith? Popular Culture in Denver's House for All Sinners and Saints
Bibliographic record
Abstract
House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS), a congregation affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Denver, Colorado, has recently attracted attention for its blend of confessional church tradition and its embrace of popular culture. It attracts the types of people not usually associated with mainstream Christianity, including queers, recovering addicts, and abuse victims. Given these biographies, a range of different subcultures has come together to shape beliefs and practices in unconventional ways. As a reaction to the opposition many members have experienced in the Christian mainstream, the congregation is rumoured to call itself ironically “Half-Ass” (after the acronym of its name—HFASS). This article frames religion and popular culture as entering into dialogue at House for All Sinners and Saints and discusses the meanings that emerge at this intersection. It argues that popular culture is not employed as a mere catch-all tool to fill the pews but, rather, serves to express deviance and dissent from the religious mainstream, encourage new forms of consciousness regarding being “unconventionally” Christian, and affirm alternative Christian-and-minority-member identities while simultaneously emphasizing the centrality of the confessional tradition for contemporary American culture.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".