Theologies in dialogue: the place of religion in the 21st century university
Bibliographic record
Abstract
summarizes the Cardinal's understanding of the university this way: "The object of a university education is to produce thinking people, no more and no less." 1 As a person of faith, Newman would have presupposed that one of the things one ought to be able to think clearly about is religion, its practice and the truth claims it makes about reality.An over-aching stipulation of any discussion of "Faith, Freedom and the Academy" that intends to celebrate and build upon Newman's important text is that Newman would expect a university to produce people who know how to think critically about religion.There are two points I would like to make regarding the legacy of Newmans' Idea of the University for our universities today.The first is a description of Religious Studies as a discipline in search of a methodology; I shall describe how I think we got here.My second point is to propose a different approach for Religious Studies departments.I suggest that we use the methodology of theological reflection, that is, critical reflection upon faith, in our Religious Studies Departments.The reason for this is that many Religious Studies departments have moved towards models and methods that belong to the intellectual family of the Social Sciences.I believe we would do well to return explicitly to the humanities branch of the University.We made the shift to the Social Science models in the interest of objectivity, because we feared we would ignore the softer, or even previously silenced voices in religious discourse.This shift brought with it problems that have overwhelmed its more positive effects.I am convinced that we can return to an explicitly theological methodology without privileging one voice.Theology, which used to be the center of gravity for the university's purpose, at least when the university was invented, has been either relegated to the fringes of the academic disciplines or in 95
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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 | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".