"What Language Shall I Borrow?" How a United Church Congregation Articulates its Choices from the 41st General Council's Recommendations Regarding Peacebuilding in Israel/Palestine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis of this dissertation is that members of the United Church of Canada who respond to the Report on Israel/Palestine Policy select from its peacebuilding recommendations according to their attitudes to theological contextualizing. Two attitudes give rise to two different methods, which are seldom articulated but underlie choices regarding peace initiatives such as boycotting or ecumenical/multifaith cooperation. The dissertation includes five parts: an investigation of contextual theologies for peacebuilders; a history of the UCC and ecumenical partners who have struggled to assist peace in Israel/Palestine; strategies for peace-minded ministers; a case-study of one congregation choosing peace strategies; and recommendations for denominational communications and peacebuilding. This thesis poses a taxonomy for theologizing in context, moving from initial interaction with the other by translating local systems of thought into terms of the Gospel message. Contextualizes proceed either to immerse in the local culture (anthropological) or to engage with locals in mutual learning (synthesis). Anthropological attitudes tend toward praxis method. Synthetic attitudes tend toward transcendental method. An examination of the UCC and its ecumenical partners shows how anthropological/praxis and synthesis/transcendental modalities have led to differing approaches to, and varying levels of grassroots engagement in, peacebuilding in the Middle-East. For UCC members, the IPP Report offers initiatives that cohere with both modalities, and the case study here shows selected congregants investigating all possibilities and choosing according to their theological commitment to love. This thesis advocates for improved communications and more persuasive reports from the national church, more frequent qualitative research at the grassroots, and persistent search for “a small way” into peace by privileging many voices.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
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".