Street, Sacrament, and Sanctuary: Discerning the Body of Christ in a Downtown Toronto Church
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many recent theologians have foregrounded the social implications of the Eucharist, seeking to move from abstract theory to theology grounded in the concrete practices of Christian communities. However, even in their consideration of practices, many of these theologians continue to speak abstractly of the logic of practices rather than their enactment and instantiation in actual churches. Hence, explorations of lived theology are an important complement and testing ground for theological claims made about the Eucharist and its role in the formation of the church as a social body. This dissertation explores the inter-relationship of the Eucharist and the life of the church through the lived theology of a particular ecclesial community, Sanctuary Toronto, which self-describes as “becoming a healthy and welcoming community where those who are poor and excluded are particularly valued.” Many of the practices at Sanctuary are deliberate attempts to unsettle the habits and dispositions of societal power relations in favour of relationships which the community sees as an “expression of the good news embodied in Jesus Christ.” Rather than mirror dominant social arrangements by relegating marginalized people to the periphery of church life as objects of ceremony or charity, the Sanctuary community seeks a eucharistic practice and a shared common life which centers around their presence, gifting, and active participation. Thus, while it is no perfect exemplar of gospel community, it provides an apt site to explore the robust theological claims being made for liturgical ethics and to highlight the essential role of the “least of these” – those who are excluded or least valued in dominant social structures – in the process of liturgical formation. Through interviews and participant observation, I place the articulated theologies and collective practices of Sanctuary in conversation with Scripture, tradition, and other theological literature—particularly recent theology which gives prominence to the Eucharist as a source of a distinctive Christian ethics, politics, and witness—in order to argue for the indispensability of the materially poor and socially excluded to the shape of the church’s common life.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".