Acta Theologica 2005:1 THE POSTFIGURATIVE CHRIST IN MORLEY CALLAGHAN’S SUCH IS MY BELOVED
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Symbolic Christ figures, i.e. characters whose lives to greatly varying extents mir-ror those of Jesus of Nazareth without being fully fledged allegories thereof, were frequently employed as fictional devices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century lite-rature as means of expressing diverse qualities, lessons, mores, and values in the modern world. One esteemed literary artist who made use of this technique was the Canadian liberal Roman Catholic layman Morley Callaghan (1903-1990). In his novel of 1934, Such Is My Beloved, the protagonist, a gifted young priest in a major city, is a latter-day reflection of Christ. In this embodiment, Social Gospel aspects of Christianity come to the fore. Symbolic Christ figures have long played prominent roles in fiction internationally and perhaps reached the zenith of their popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not until the 1960s, however, was more than infrequent scholarly analysis undertaken of these characters or their significance defined in terms of literary theory. The emergence of “religion and literature ” as a scholarly discipline undoubtedly stimulated both literary scholars and theologians to pay them increased attention during the third quarter of the twentieth cen-tury. In one seminal article the eminent South African novelist Alan Paton, whose intensely spiritual Cry, the Beloved Country had appeared in 1948, and Professor Liston Pope analysed various efforts to model modern characters on Jesus Christ and concluded that for several rea-sons such endeavours were almost invariably foreordained to failure. Twentieth-century authors who sought to create such a character, they pointed out, could no longer either assume that readers were familiar with the rudimentary lineaments of the story of Jesus or that they were not; consequently, they ran the risk of writing arcane plots with little symbolic meaning or boring readers with pedantic allegories. More-over, Paton and Pope cited the limitations posed by a pre-existing plot
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.005 |
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".