Church at the Wall: A Political and Liturgical Analysis of Border Masses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the phenomenon of border Masses, those instances where clergy have led the faithful outside the church building and outside the regular schedule of sacraments to the United States–Mexico border to celebrate Mass as an overtly political act, describing how border Masses open up new ways of thinking about the relationship of Eucharist and politics, as well as the role that ecclesial practices should have in shaping Christian political engagement, and attempting to show how a consideration of these services might clarify the functions, possibilities, and limits of liturgy. First, I provide a description of these border Masses as they have occurred, including the context, rhetoric, participants, and shape of the liturgy. The second section describes the political and topographical space in which these services take place; the border is examined with attention to the way that such a construction shapes Christian identity and practice. Given this context, I move to address the recent debates over politics and Christian liturgy that centre on the latter’s capacity for positive transformation. I examine the Eucharistic and liturgical theology that serve as the foundation for border Masses to think about the ways that the practice itself, and the ways that God shows up in the sacrament, might push back and challenge us in unanticipated ways. Are practices of Eucharist at the border a revolutionary force that might upend the injustices that necessitate a border wall? Are they rituals that only reinforce social norms and whose impact is reduced to pragmatic appeals for modifications to existing laws? What resources might we find in these spaces to help move both the Church and the world toward justice?
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".