Bibliographic record
Abstract
Religion as a category and object of study in (Western) academia has undergone a sequence of upheavals over the last several decades, responding to significant transformations in global society and as a reflection of internal disciplinary developments. This paper focuses on such transformations and developments principally within the disciplines the sociology of religion and religious studies. After summarizing these transformations, it presents three interrelated arguments: a) Both transformations, in the disciplines and in the larger social context, are the latest versions of very long discussion and development that have their roots in the nineteenth-twentieth century foundation of religion as an analytic category, in the imperial/colonial spread and glocal appropriation of the category of religion, and in the “Westphalian” institutional modeling of religion with the modern nationstate. b) The current transformations in the “religious field” are a reflection of a decline in that modeling, yielding further uncertainty about how religion should be conceived. c) The ideas of religion and secularization should not be discarded, but should be contextualized in a broader diversity of categorization that goes beyond the binary modeling of religion/not-religion (or secular). A systems-theoretical approach informs all three arguments.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".