“‘Cause Even Though Perfect It’s Not/ It’s the Best Thing This World’s Got” – or Not?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This short reply considers and rejects from the point of view of Religious Studies, proposals that something of “religious literacy” should be salvaged, either for pedagogical or for other pragmatic purposes. It further rejects suggestions that the critique of religious literacy entails an obligation on the part of the critic to find an alternative raison d’être for Religious Studies. The resonance of religious literacy clearly derives from a powerful legacy of institutional social discipline spanning nearly 500 years; yet only very recently has the concept been re-purposed as core academic mission. Therefore, the costs of abandoning religious literacy now are minimal (except for those institutions who rashly bet everything on the paradigm); by comparison, the costs of pursuing it seem high and include a possible re-assimilation of academic to other historical institutions of social discipline such as penitentiaries (with “residential” and other “reformatory” schools representing significant hybrid or transitional formations).
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 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 | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
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".