Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment: From Angels and Superheroes to Humans and Community in the Marvel Universe and Green Christian Cosmology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines “sky saviour” themes in a number of sources in the Western cultural domain, from biblical texts to contemporary paranormal fantasy, in contrast with some countercultural and ecocritical reformulations that are earth-centred. I postulate “narratives of empowerment” as representations of humans’ relationships with remembered and imagined landscapes which aim to construct new identities. I apply biosemiotic and relational theoretical approaches to inquire into the evolving nature of these representations, and what they might say about our changing human identity, from “oppressed” humans ascending to the sky to “oppressors” of the earth. Furthermore, I discuss how empowered identities are constructed through sublimated sexualities, as a means of experiencing the sky. In contrast, I show that earth-centred narratives of empowerment in Green Christian contexts reflect a transformed cosmology, with community and creativity leading to salvation. This earth-centred model is also present in popular fiction, as evidenced in my discussion of the new Marvel heroes, suggesting a democratization of the sacred and the paranormal.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".