In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality and Cultural Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Daniel Coleman. In Bed With Word: Reading, Spirituality and Cultural Politics. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2009. 142 + xii pp. $19.95 (CAN) ISBN: 978-0-88864-507-4. Religion is, of course, many things--but it is also certainly literate. In beginning, after all, was word, and today there are countless examples of scrolls, scriptures, commentaries, and church bulletins to remind us that reading remains central to religious life. Scholars of religion, however, often shunt study of reading as a devotional practice in their research. We are very good at understanding, analyzing, and deconstructing what texts say, but we are much less inclined to explore how religious people touch, hold, mark, underline, cut, copy, carry, discuss, highlight, and dog-ear those texts (to explore, in short, how people read). Onto such fertile interpretive ground, Daniel Coleman's brief, but rich, reflection on reading charts several intellectual pathways that scholars can follow in studying this dense cultural practice. Coleman's approach is somewhat metaphysical, seeking to explore reading's essence as opposed to classifying sociological variants of reading practices. Drawing upon literary theory, classical theology, social history, and personal anecdote, Coleman argues that reading creates a kind of internal interpretive space that becomes filled with inescapable paradoxes of human experience. To sit with a book is fundamentally an act of isolation, one that and enforces the fact that we are uniquely and finally alone (7). Yet reading also connects reader to narratives and communities and identities that are beyond one's immediate social reality. By engaging stories and hypotheses of a text, reading imparts new ideas or interpretations to reader. Yet as collections of signs and symbols that only represent an author's ideas or intent, texts ultimately embody what Coleman calls a metaphysics of absence (78) that forces reader to manufacture their own meaning. Between isolation and community, presence and absence, and meaning and mystery is a chasm that reading, again paradoxically, emphasizes and (72). And ways in which reading and bridges these tensions, Coleman continues, are inextricably and political. Coleman here intentionally conceives of reading as a spiritual practice as opposed to a religious one, for he seeks to construe a more universal conception of reading that situates it within fundamental human desires. The connections a reader experiences in encountering worlds beyond their own embody a drive or energy in ourselves that is outward-reaching, that is a kind of longing to be meaningfully connected (9). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".