Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Figure: see text] As engagement with art is increasingly recognized as an exciting and accepted practice in theology, theologians are faced with questions concerning the purposes of such engagement and how best to undertake it. This article argues that engagement with art is not merely the purview of an esoteric subdiscipline known as “Theology and the Arts” but offers an opportunity for theologians to confront the humanity at the heart of their own work, including guilt, error, and corruption, which will enable progress toward the goal of greater intimacy and belonging. Taking seriously the idea that both our theological concepts and our intellectual habits have been shaped by social and material realities, this article asks how we ought to think about theological engagement with art given that we are prone to colonizing habits of thought that affect such engagement. By putting theologians including Willie Jennings and Emilie Townes in conversation with theories about art from T.J. Clark, Alva Noe, and James A. Noel, we ask how theologians might resist temptations to categorize art as theology's other or absorb it into its own concerns, both of which reflect colonizing habits of mind and inure theology against a genuine confrontation with art. We recommend a posture of silence, responsive to the silence of the painting itself, in which the theologian opens to self-reflexive questions about both the operations of their own imagination, creativity, imagery, silence, and more, as well as the implications for the theological concepts used to designate those realities.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".