A Homiletic of Humour: The Use of Humour as Critical Method in Hermeneutic, Theological, and Preaching Practices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the strategic role of humour in the Synoptic Gospels and its implications for prophetic preaching. Drawing from a cross-disciplinary foundation that incorporates linguistics, feminist philosophy, critical humour theory, and biblical studies, this work seeks to address a notable deficiency within the existing scholarly literature on preaching, which has historically marginalized the role of humour in scriptural contexts. The analysis reveals that humour, far from being a mere rhetorical flourish, serves as a critical tool for engaging with theological themes, challenging oppressive structures, and fostering community cohesion. A key contribution of this study is the development of an analytical algorithm to identify the presence and role of humour within the Gospels. Within theological inquiry, the capacity of humor to encompass both tragedy and joy without succumbing to polarization is explored. The resulting theology of humour offers a way to build resilience and authenticity. Finally, the dissertation proposes a new homiletic framework that centres on humour, offering a significant contribution to exegetical and homiletic scholarship. This framework underscores the importance of humour in interpreting the Gospels, suggesting that it can provide new insights for engaging, relevant, and meaningful prophetic preaching.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it