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Record W4409178247 · doi:10.1080/15426432.2025.2483486

Spirituality and social work: a view from the borderlands

2025· article· en· W4409178247 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Clive Baldwin

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work Social Thought · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicReligion, Spirituality, and Psychology
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsSpiritualityWork (physics)SociologySocial workPsychologyPolitical scienceEngineeringMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this position paper, I argue that social work’s encroachment into and onto spirituality is both misguided and an affront. Drawing on the literature of religious studies, my own experience, and insights from my research into New Religious Movements and alternative spiritualties, I argue that social work’s attempt to incorporate spirituality into its practice is highly problematic. Problems of definition, insider/outsider considerations, and reductionism are rife yet unacknowledged in the social work literature. Social work’s view of spirituality as a resource to be drawn upon is offensively instrumental, and its denial of the troubling and disturbing aspects of spirituality – the mysterium tremendum – reveals its naiveté. Social work would do better to leave well alone.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.029

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.038
Scholarly communication0.0120.010
Open science0.0010.009
Research integrity0.0050.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.040
GPT teacher head0.375
Teacher spread0.335 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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