The Heart of Relics: Catholic Relics, Affect, and the Heart of Brother Andre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Catholic relics elicit strong emotion and are thought to have healing powers; they are an important part of Catholic practice, yet their affect is not often explicitly explored. Arguing that relics are affective, or emotionally impactful, because they are part of a system that encourages intense emotional reactions through sensation and perception, this thesis examines the transmutability of Catholic relics and their emotional impact beyond religious doctrine using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of affect, emotion and empathy. Locating Catholic practice within a twentieth-century Quebec context in the form of a case study, this investigation of affect is situated through events surrounding the display of the relic heart of Brother André in the 1970s as well as his larger healing ministry. Utilizing discourse and media analysis methods and set against the historical background of the body and physicality in Catholicism, an overview of the sensory and emotional history of relics, and the emotional attachment of the faithful to the saints, this thesis concludes that the positive affect generated by Catholic relics is transmissible to non-Catholics, as humans are susceptible to empathic contagion.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".