Religion in Interesting Times: Contesting Form, Function, and Future
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Religion in our world is not just a contested category, it is also one which does political work, having implications for the distribution of power in society. Classifying social action and symbols as religion or as something else, above all culture or spirituality, has political implications and is used to carry out political struggles. Starting from two concrete contemporary examples drawn from the Canadian context having to do with smudging and the crucifix, the article argues that the historical form that religion has taken functioned in earlier modern centuries as a way of favourably distributing power to religion’s carriers; but that with the progressive development of secular forms of power, religion has progressively been moving towards become a form that is mostly neutral in terms of social power distribution but can also be a source of power loss, these through interrelated processes of privatization, pluralization, and voluntarization. In current circumstances, therefore, in order for what is or was religious form to preserve or regain its erstwhile function for privileged power distribution, one sees attempts in various instances to dissolve religion into other categories and forms; here the prime instances are (national) culture and (instrumental) spirituality. If this process continues and counter-movements do not succeed, then this points to the progressive deinstitutionalisation of religion in the future, its dissolution into collective culture and personal spirituality, while maintaining its religious form in smaller local and transnational organizations and movements.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 it