Becoming Saints: Coptic Orthodox Monasticism, Exemplarity, Negotiating Christian Virtue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on 13 months of transnational ethnographic fieldwork between Egypt, Southern California, and Toronto, this dissertation examines questions around exemplarity, morality, and the cultivation of virtue among Coptic Orthodox Christians. Specifically, this thesis investigates the relationship between Coptic monks and the wider Coptic community. Many Copts view monasticism as a morally exemplary way of life. The monk as one who has forsaken all social ties and lives in the desert is regarded as one who has attained the highest form of virtue. This view results in different levels of engagement with monastic practice and competing voices for what it means to be a Coptic Christian. As will be demonstrated through ethnographic details, there is a gap between the ideals of the Coptic monastic imaginary and the lived reality of negotiating Christian virtue for monks and laity alike. Furthermore, this dissertation unpacks the ways in which Coptic monasticism is (re-)imagined and (re-)produced in North America and how Coptic subjectivity is (re-)negotiated in relation to Egypt and the Mother Church.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".