MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.453
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.004
Science and technology studies0.0050.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
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

Explore more

Same venueJournal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work Social ThoughtSame topicReligion, Spirituality, and PsychologyFrench-language works237,207