A Spiritual Dimension of Human–Animal Relations?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT A close relationship with nature and animals is widely acknowledged to support human physical, social, and mental health, but is more seldom considered relevant for human spirituality. Using theological resources, this paper argues that some human–animal relations may possess spiritual qualities. While classical Christian (Augustinian and Thomistic) theologies give limited support for said spiritual dimensions, Franciscan traditions, modern incarnation theology, and ecotheology provide inspiration to articulate spiritual elements in some human–animal relationships. The latter theologies resonate well with the holistic nature views in specific Eastern religious traditions (Hinduism and Daoism). Together, these resources may serve as interreligious and cross‐cultural inspirations for a human relationship to animals that incorporates spiritual elements of biological, social, and divine interconnectedness. While our arguments may relate mostly to companion animals, they have relevance for human relations to all animals in the more‐than‐human nature. Empirical studies can be done in the future to test if specific human–animal relationships affect human spirituality. If confirmed, a Christian theology of animals that is attentive to potential spiritual effects of human–animal relationships will support health and flourishing in a world where humans are often alienated from nature and animals.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it