This Changes Everything: Decolonizing Theo-Anthropology toward an Earth-Centered Approach to Pastoral Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many have argued that the colonizing conceptual infrastructures of the so-called West normalize human exceptionalism and reinforce anthropocentric priorities all of which have enabled and perpetuated the climate crisis. The discipline of pastoral theology is no exception. Perhaps more than any other theological discipline, pastoral theology organizes our scholarship, teaching and practice around anthropocentric foci and goals—the living human document or web, practices of justice and care that address human suffering and serve human flourishing. While recent scholarship has done much to prioritize decolonizing approaches to justice and care, in many cases this continues through an anthropocentric lens. How do we re-imagine pastoral theology in ways that do not perpetuate the crisis but rather serve the thriving of life in all its forms? This paper explores responses to this question. First, I present a summary of literature on pastoral theology and the climate crisis so far. Second, I examine and critique the discipline’s embedded theo-anthropology through a discussion of imago Dei and related metaphors. Third, I explore some alternative theological motifs and sources that lean toward earth-centered, decolonizing approaches to pastoral theology.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".