Which Limits of Virtual Religious Life? On the Experience of Holy in the Digital Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article the possibility of an online Eucharist is assessed as a special case of virtual religious life and of a digital experience of the holy. More precisely, two types of arguments are given against the possibility of an online Eucharist—of a theological and of a phenomenological nature. While the theological argument highlights the shared and receptive dimension of the Eucharist, which makes possible its intrinsically communal and incarnated nature, the phenomenological argument shows that this receptive and shared dimension presupposes the materiality of the host, which in its turn makes possible the experience of its holiness, namely as that which cannot be profaned through bodily actions. Here Otto's and Eliade's opposition between the holy and the profane is revisited, whereby the holy is conceived not merely as the opposite of the profane, but as that which cannot be profaned, and as that which implies the prohibition of particular actions and bodily gestures that can be carried out only on a material object. Hence, materiality and holiness are intrinsically correlated following this understanding of the holy. Drawing on this reinterpretation of the concept of holy, it is argued that virtuality cannot preserve the materiality and consequently the holy dimension of the host, and for this reason, that it cannot preserve the receptive and shared dimension of the Eucharist. Hence, despite advances in digital technology, the Eucharist appears to be an insuperable limit of virtual religious life, at least in our contemporary world and its current digital possibilities.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
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.
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".