Home in Three Dimensions: Personal Location in Comparative and Transreligious Theologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reflects on my experience of what it means to have a “home” as a comparative theologian. As I treat comparative theology and transreligious theology here, both are religiously engaged practices. Comparative theology begins from a religious location and seeks to enrich it with learning that can be shared in that community, while transreligious theology engages with religious input in a “free range” manner, with no presumed outcome. Comparative theologians do not shy away from practice that becomes participation in another tradition, and transreligious theologians do not shy away from conclusions or actions that might place them more on one religious path than another. If to know only one religion is, in important respects, to know none, so too are those not pursuing any particular religious path partially disabled in knowing aspects of all others. Home points to the existential dimension always at play in this kind of scholarship, and this essay illustrates what that dimension looks like in my case. Such examples suggest the complexity nestled in the idea of home, a complexity with its own comparative theological character. If home is meant to indicate a reference point, it is a moving target for all of us. This article is framed around three aspects of that complexity: home as where we come from, where we live, and where we are going.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".