It is No Longer I who Live: Understanding Priestly Formation from Within a Pedagogy of Holiness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theological education, and the formation of priests, is a topic that the 2013 meeting of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada took very seriously. It was there that reports from the Primate’s commission on theological education were submitted. National guidelines were approved by the governing body, and now the document “Competencies for Ordination to the Priesthood” can be found in vocation offices across the nation. While the work of the Primate’s commission is good, there is a difference between vocational competency and vocational formation. I, therefore, embarked on a journey that took me across the country and as far as Vatican City in search of an answer to the ensuing question: What is the essential feature that makes seminary formation a school of prayer and not just an interesting course of study? My goal in this thesis is to challenge the dominant model of theological education as it exists in the Anglican Church today, and to demonstrate how the dominant model affects the formation of priests. My goal is not to critique the work done by the Primate’s commissions on education. Nevertheless, the nature of phenomenological research based on lived experience, is always prone to challenge (sometimes upset) the work of committees and think-tanks. Using grounded theory methodology, I employ one-on-one interviews, rigorous verbatim analysis, data coding and theological reflection to name the essential features of priestly formation - the sacrament of the mentor. Priestly formation in the Anglican Church of Canada is happening in the most ordinary ways; it is happening in life-transforming, intimate, and holy ways. If there has ever been a time, since the great English monastic period, that we need to re-imagine the life and mission of the Anglican seminary, the time is now. This is the challenge: to set the seminary free for the work of holiness.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".