Bibliographic record
Abstract
This deeply thoughtful and important work draws on classical sociological theory and a range of empirical data to offer a unique insight into the nature and significance of ‘the spiritual turn’ in modern Western democracies. It should be of great interest, not just to sociologists of religion, but to all sociologists of culture. Galen Watts covers an immense amount of intellectual and ethnographic ground with great clarity, intelligence, and passion. In doing so, he challenges received ideas about liberalism, spirituality, and the individual; but he also presents a positive ethical vision in critical yet constructive dialogue with such figures as Émile Durkheim, Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. The Spiritual Turn is an indispensable read for anybody interested in the moral underpinnings of contemporary liberal democracies. Efforts to salvage religion as a form of personal spirituality have been recurrent since the nineteenth century, and Watts brings keen cultural, sociological, and ethnographic analysis to those sundry projects of self-realization and experiential insight, especially as they have found expression since the 1960s. He artfully balances empathy and critique in his pursuit of those spiritual inquirers who tune themselves—both creatively and predictably—to the discursive norms of romantic, liberal modernity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.837 | 0.728 |
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".