Review of “Prayer as Transgression?: The Social Relations of Prayer in Healthcare Settings”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewer: Wendy Cadge, Brandeis University, USA The essays that comprise this volume focus, in different ways, on what happens when prayer shows up in hospitals. The authors, who worked together on a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, conducted research in twenty-one hospitals, long-term care facilities, and community clinics in London and Vancouver. They interviewed and spent time with patients and staff in preoperative rooms, chapels, prayer rooms, and other settings seeing how prayer creates meaning and challenges biomedicine’s narrow focus on cure. The voices woven through the volume include those of scholars alongside indigenous elders, chaplains, patients, and staff members with widely diverse backgrounds. Deeply inter-disciplinary the authors represent and speak to concerns in health studies, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, theology, and chaplaincy studies. Relying on an understanding of transgression as the ability to go beyond boundaries, limits, and conventions, the authors explore the social functions of prayer and how the sacred disrupts the order of things. As outlined in the introduction, they identify prayer transgressing secular spaces; social differences of race, class, and gender; and ways of conceptualizing and relating to the metaphysical. They play with normative and interpretive questions about prayer as good or bad, connected to religion and/or spirituality, an individual and/or social act, and that which takes place in settings identified as religious and/or secular. Lived religious frames inform the work as do intersectional and reflexive frames central to feminist and critical theory.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.087 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
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".