A Politics of Connected Flesh: Public Theology, Ecology, and Merleau-Ponty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract After critically reviewing the ongoing development of various publics in public theology, this article attempts to develop an additional public in nonanthropocentric terms in order to ground adequately public theology’s approach to the current climate crisis. Seeking a path between an account of Earth as a commons, with its emphasis on similarity and the diffractive method’s emphasis on the separateness of biodiverse lives, it argues that Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of the flesh of the world provides material for a politically engaged public theology. In emphasizing the separateness of embodied selves in the perceptual fields of embodied flesh, it develops an account of the ecosphere as an ontologically grounding public to correct the limitations of various ‘publics’ as human-centered institutions. In doing so, the transcendence of Earth’s embodied inhabitants is emphasized that conceives of public in terms of the connective tissues of more-than-human bodies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".