Review essay: When the dancing turned to mourning: Theological responses to the pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This review essay considers four books published within the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It guides us through how each of these texts offers a timely Christian response to, and not explanation for, the challenges that we face: innumerable deaths, the inability to worship together, deserted streets and shut-up businesses, the place of viruses in the Earth’s ecology, and the apparent absence of God as the innovations of modern science seem to be our only salvation. Reviewed works:John C. Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World? (Epsom, Surrey: The Good Book Company, 2020)Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: SPCK: 2020)Walter Brueggemann, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2020)Robert Keay, Reframing Pandemic (The Window of Christianity series; New York: Basiliad Publishing, 2020)
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.005 |
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".