Thematic Homilies: a Study of Preaching at Saint Benedict Parish, Halifax (Canada)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of the study is to evaluate the thematic programming of the preaching handbook, “Preaching on Purpose: A Divine Renovation Handbook for Communicating the Gospel Today” (2022), co-written by priests from Saint Benedict Parish, Halifax (Canada). I assess the consonance of the homiletic concept employed in the handbook with the Church’s Magisterium on homiletics and how it could be of help to homily programming. The first part presents the Church’s post-conciliar reflections on thematic homilies in five points. Then, the theory of homily programming, as described in the handbook, and a sample preaching series are discussed. Finally, the series is discussed in relation to the Church’s vision of the homily. The conclusions reveal that while the Halifax thematic homilies interfere with liturgy due to the lack of mystagogy, excessive and elaborate slideshows, and moral calls without catechesis, homily programming suggestions remain useful for homilists because the preachers correctly deliver the kerygma and existential actualization, plan series methodically, and co-operate with the lay faithful.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".