Spiritualizing Politics Without Politicizing Religion: The Example of Sargent Shriver. By James R. Price and Kenneth R. Melchin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Spiritualizing Politics without Politicizing Religion, authors James Price and Kenneth Melchin profile Sargent Shriver (1915–2011), an American Catholic diplomat, politician, and one of the charismatic forces behind the creation of the US Peace Corps. The book aims to offer an exploration of Shriver’s life, understood through the lens of his faith and values and as expressed through his political work. The problems that the authors identify as a core motivator for the book are big and important: that religion and politics must coexist, and the United States needs to find constructive ways to recognize the role of values in public life. They assert that the United States needs “new horizons that enable us to explore and articulate values on all sides of the issues,” a claim with which I agree entirely (p. 4). The stated intent of the book is to offer one possible framework for doing so. Unfortunately, the project’s ambitions rather outstrip its achievements in this regard. While Shriver was an accomplished and charismatic figure, the authors’ seemingly unproblematized respect for him impedes the clarity of the argument, limiting their ability to extend the insights from this case to other aspects of US political life. The lack of critical (rather than laudatory) engagement with source material can make the book feel unserious. It is relevant here that one author is the Director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute, and the other is a Catholic theologian: they are both meaningfully predisposed toward Shriver himself. While most scholars have opinions about the things we study, the lack of self-reflection in the book’s pages makes the reader feel as though she is trapped in a loop of circular logic: Shriver was an effective statesman because of his Catholic values, and his Catholic values made Shriver an effective statesman.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".