The Stories We Tell Our Children: Narratives of Mortality in a Secular Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation proposes that a natural theology of death exists in Western English-language children’s literature, where a Christian foundation shapes the stories we continue to tell our children. Using writings from church tradition, such as Augustine’s Confessions and The Book of Common Prayer, I undertake a theological reading of the discussion of death in children’s literature classics, namely Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–1869), J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911), E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007), in order to suggest that children’s literature about death witnesses to the buried roots of the Christian tradition in the West, however equivocal they may be in the modern and secular context. To make this argument, I employ a close reading of the selected texts, ordered by the sequence of the dissertation’s chapters, with reference to literary criticism and reception history, incorporating a theological phenomenological method of interpretation. Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life (2016) informs my understanding of mortality as essential to theological anthropology, located in the contemporary West as described by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). My ultimate aim is to suggest, as much on the basis of Christian confession as on the ongoing witness of the ”stories we tell our children,” that our mortality is essential to what it means to be human, binding us to one another and to God, because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In short, I contend that we continue to tell stories to children which testify that to be human is to be mortal, filiated, and Christ-figured, and we insist on doing this even in our current secular age. This ongoing literary practice is itself a religious phenomenon that deserves being taken seriously.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".