Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rising popularity of the “spiritual but not religious” moniker across Canada and the West more generally has confounded scholars and laypersons alike. Against those who view the discursive shift from “religion” to “spirituality” in the twenty-first century as evidence of the incoherence of the contemporary spiritual landscape, I argue that, despite its apparent diversity, much of what goes by “spirituality” among this cohort exhibits striking uniformity in its basic structure. The implicit argument, then, is that observers who decry the fuzziness and indeterminacy of spirituality have focused too much on superficial differences at the expense of underlying similarities. In short, they have missed the forest for the trees. I begin by placing the rise of the spiritual but not religious in historical context. In this task, I follow philosopher Charles Taylor, whose insights into the massive subjective turn of modern culture have rarely been surpassed. I then outline the basic characteristics of the spiritual framework underlying the shift from religion to spirituality—what I call “self-spirituality.” Drawing from my qualitative research with Canadian millennials, I seek to locate self-spirituality within the current social and political landscape. Finally, in locating self-spirituality within a particular religious tradition, I turn to the social thought of Ernst Troeltsch, whose perceptive observations, made at the outset of the twentieth century, remain invaluable for making sense of recent religious developments. As we shall see, in light of Troeltsch’s insights, the rise of the spiritual but not religious looks quite different from what many have imagined.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".