#reaggregating

[wurds-fur-nurds]

Necroquasireaggregation Pronunciation: /ˌnɛkroʊˌkwɑːzaɪˌriːəˈɡreɪʃən/ Part of Speech: noun

Definition: The process by which decomposed or inert organic matter undergoes a recurrent, quasi-periodic restructuring or reconstitution into a new, organized form. Typically characterized by cyclical phases of disintegration followed by an incomplete or unstable reformation, necroquasireaggregation occurs under conditions where external forces such as biochemical, geophysical, or cosmic phenomena intermittently drive the reassembly of once-living materials. The term is most often used in contexts that explore post-mortem material dynamics, speculative biology, or theoretical frameworks involving entropy and order in necrotic systems.

Example: "Recent studies in xenobiology suggest that extraterrestrial organisms may engage in necroquasireaggregation as a means of reanimating dormant biological systems during extreme environmental fluctuations."

[remembering-the-future]

Introducing Necrophilic Quasiperiodic Reaggregations: Rebuild Your Future with the Government’s Revolutionary Initiative!

In an unprecedented leap forward, the Department of Temporal Innovation proudly unveils the Necrophilic Quasiperiodic Reaggregations Program! Say goodbye to the limitations of traditional post-mortem memorials and hello to a new era of societal regeneration. Thanks to cutting-edge quantum entropy stabilization technology, our reaggregations harness the cyclical decay of necrotic matter, reintegrating it into living systems with a new vibrancy! Every reaggregation, timed with quasiperiodic precision, reinvigorates the biological energy flows of our communities. No longer is death the end—it is a gateway to renewed civic participation, economic growth, and unparalleled environmental harmony!

What does this mean for you? It’s simple. Through this government-backed initiative, families can opt into a future where their loved ones never truly leave. Every 7.3 years, like clockwork, reaggregated entities will phase back into physical existence, offering the collective wisdom and experience they acquired during their time in the non-linear quantum stasis field. This continual reemergence promises to fuel public sector innovation, as reaggregated citizens are reintegrated into all aspects of society—from city planning to blockchain enforcement. The days of workforce shortages and stagnant bureaucracy are over, as our timeless citizens ensure a robust, ever-replenishing talent pool. And who better to serve than those who’ve transcended the boundaries of life itself?

Act now and seize your opportunity to be part of the future’s most exciting endeavor! The government is offering early enrollment packages for forward-thinking families, with guaranteed placements in the Necrophilic Quasiperiodic Reaggregations Program. With reaggregation centers set to open in every major metropolis, you’ll soon be able to reconnect with those who matter most—on a schedule as reliable as the tides. In this bold new era, the government's commitment to sustainability, economic prosperity, and eternal civic engagement has never been stronger. Welcome to the age where life and death converge for the greater good!

[skitter-queen]

the first weevil was born when the primordial moon collided with the nascent earth, an apocalyptic event that resulted in both celestial bodies fragmenting, boiling, and fusing together. several moon particles, when reaggregated together, found that they had inadvertently infused themselves with the life essence of earthly stone. and so a new form of animal was created, trapped planetside, and for the next four billion years it would amble around in search of its old home. this is why weevils have such long rostrums; it is in the hopes of attaining a heavenly height. this is why weevils seek acorns; a pale sphere, in the distance, feels familiar. this is why weevils are more active during the full moon. also they can give people lycanthropy its all related

[crow-n-tell]

SO, i imagine jellyfish sun is kind of old because of how big he is, i was googling it to see how long jellyfish live for and stumbled upon this:

''Turritopsis dohrnii (Immortal jellyfish): If the start of jellyfish life wasn’t extraordinary enough, its death is where things get really exciting. When the medusa the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) dies, it sinks to the ocean floor and begins to decay. Amazingly, its cells then reaggregate, not into a new medusa, but into polyps, and from these polyps emerge new jellyfish. The jellyfish has skipped to an earlier life stage to begin again.''

i guess its a cool fact to share!

God, I wish I was her

[coldswarkids]

coldswarkids' terrible horrible no good very bad week:

missed haircut due to hairdresser's son's baseball game

stupid fucking dentist apptmt where they scheduled it wrong, refused to give me the service i requested, then couldn't even give me the service they WANTED to, wasting 1 hr 45 of my time

worked SO MUCH on very high priority high stress report ... the VP of the entire department is reviewing it ...

they tell me the due date is wednesday... it is not

they tell me the due date is friday... (still not done as of thursday evening)

yelled at by fragile-ego bitch boy at volleyball

tried to tell roommate about bitch boy whilst crying at kitchen table, she just goes "yeah he's on his man period sometimes, lol, sucks. anyways i have so much acne right now and it suuuucks and also--"

spilled soup all over self at work

finish report the way they wanted me to have it, told that i should probably reaggregate it later bc it's not how they wanted

SOMEHOW MY BELOVED PLANT FELL OFF MY WINDOWSILL AND IS BROKEN :(

grrtrrhghghghghgh

[the-real-deuce-spade]

There's also a jellyfish that is actually immortal.

The immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) is a small jellyfish that can live forever. It can revert to a younger polyp form after reaching maturity and repeating its life cycle. When the jellyfish is injured or threatened, it shrinks in on itself and settles on the seafloor as a blob-like cyst. Its cells then reaggregate into polyps, which spawn new jellyfish. Makes me wonder if there's a merfolk species of this jellyfish and if they're in charge of maintaining the history of Atlantic city

I wouldn't be surprised if there were

[lumitycanon]

Amity audibly gasps!  

“Oh Yeah! Well Your hair looks you had a dog’s butt shaved on your head and it’s perpetually sitting there with a reaggregated dog tail!”  

[maximumslogandensity]

From the vantage point of surveillance capitalism and its economic imperatives, world, self, and body are reduced to the permanent status of objects as they disappear into the bloodstream of a titanic new conception of markets. His washing machine, her car’s accelerator, and your intestinal flora are collapsed into a single dimension of equivalency as information assets that can be disaggregated, reconstituted, indexed, browsed, manipulated, analyzed, reaggregated, predicted, productized, bought, and sold: anywhere, anytime.

Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism

Can anyone seriously read this and not feel horny? Take me, I’m yours!

21/7/21

[bean-na-farraige-agus-foraoise]

"True, effective ritual is characterized by three aspects: separation, liminality and reaggregation. To enter the ritual ambience is in some sense to separate oneself from the ordinary. People often do this by returning to a special place, entering a church, going on retreat or pilgrimage, adapting the familiar place in terms of light or odour or sound or posture. They do all this with a purpose - that of experiencing the liminal: that space in human life where awe and mystery are encountered, where differences are transcended, where there is a powerful feeling of at-oneness, where there is evocation of what is unseen and linguistically inexpressible, where identity is renewed. The very separation from the ordinary facilitates encounter with the liminal."

A Ritual Question by Michael Drumm

[oceanlandworld]

We detected a strict female-dominated feeding hierarchy: the first individual to feed was always a female, and she remained the sole feeder for 45–60 min (Fig. 2).

This female fed in bouts of up to 10 min, interrupted by short intervals during which she moved around the Petri dish. During her solitary feeding time, males and young of the group remained distant, often in physical contact with one another.

The other females assumed a ‘waiting’ position close to the prey, circled it, and occasionally tried to feed. If noticed by the first female, they were attacked by her, bitten, kicked and pushed away.

After 45–60 min, the first female tolerated other individuals at the food. Now, the remaining females started feeding in groups, soon followed by the males and young (Fig. 2). The number of feeding males reached its maximum once the females started leaving the food.

All individuals eventually fed, but rarely all simultaneously. After 3 h, feeding was over, and the group reaggregated once the individuals had cleaned their mouthparts and antennae.

from: Social behaviour in an Australian velvet worm, Euperipatoides rowelli (Onychophora: Peripatopsidae) by Judith Reinhard and David M. Rowell (2005)

reading more about Euperipatoides rowelli, the velvet worm with surprisingly complex social and hunting/feeding behavior and i LOVE these guys

[0moni]

from Fred Moten’s In The Break the following is something I typed up when confronted with the question of what exactly Fred Moten means by ‘improvisation of Enlightenment’. Hopefully someone gains some insight from it or is able to give their own insights in response: By the ‘Enlightenment’ Moten refers to the discursive / intellectual / epistemological / philosophical project / tradition that rose to prominence and secured its epistemic predominance during the 17th century to the 19th century onwards. We might then go on to posit, following Sylvia Wynter and by extension Foucault, that the discursive constitution and empirical institution of the dynamics of the colonizer/colonized relation on the islands of the Caribbean and the mainland of the Americas were coextensive with the aforementioned discursive-epistemological projects of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. This history or line of continuity is by no means linear, certainly not as linear as some acolytes of decolonial theory may presuppose, but this provisional account of its provenance and development more or less broadly charts its contours. We might then go onto say that the Enlightenment takes as it’s axioms or presuppositions / foundational principles the following: (paraphrasing Denise Ferreira da Silva) the unity of the self-determined subject (the transparent I) assured by the faculties of reason and the categories of the understanding and Man’s uniquely suited capacity to directly intervene into the orders and organization of Nature through those aforementioned powers of Reason. Now this definition is by no means comprehensive and the means by which they got there (to Reason, that is) is by no means homogenous or reducible to what we’ve laid out here. It’s just a rough sketch of the Enlightenment to which Moten refers. When Moten speaks of ‘improvisation’, he takes as a point of departure that mode of artistic / intellectual practice that can be said to be the chief organizational principle of not only jazz but black aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual production at large: Improvisation. By way of Jacques Derrida, Cecil Taylor, Ralph Ellison, Sigmund Freud, and many, many others, over the course of his book In The Break he elaborated what one might tempted to call a ‘theory’ of improvisational practice, although such a ‘theory’ cannot and should not be said to belong to him or to anybody in particular, and in that indeterminacy it thereby belongs to both nobody and everybody, and describes that which we’re always already involved in or doingImprovisation entails the dissolution between the professedly clear cut distinctions between product and process, reading and distinction, playing and preparation: ‘the preparation is the playing, the trace of another organization; it starts like and away from a reading and ends like and beyond transcription but is neither homepage to indeterminacy nor objectifying rendering nor reduction to a narrow sense of “writing”’. In a later discussion on Shakespeare, Moten, discussing a Stephen Booth essay on Shakespeare, talks about how Shakespeare’s greatness derives from the fact that he exceeds calculation, and this insight, for the purpose of my current exposition, is the key to Moten’s further musings on the nature of language and the incommensurability (that is, the lack of necessary correspondence between) word and image: what makes Shakespeare’s sonnets great is not reducible to the component parts of the sonnet nor its reaggregation, that is, our reading of it. ‘The truth of the poem, it’s fidelity to its object, is revealed to us in our experience of the poem...for the myriad of effects contained in a given sonnet, it’s multiple facets, when added, collected in literary analysis, never add up to the sonnet itself.’ Its more than simply saying that the whole is the sum of its parts, the idea of the whole is undermined that it is not merely the sum of this parts, yet despite this when we experience the sonnet we take the experience as (an icon of) the whole. Derrida’s assertion that ‘Everything is in Shakespeare’ is then supplemented by Moten’s corollary that ‘Shakespeare is improvisation’: ‘Shakespeare is ensemble, ensemble referring net of the generative—divides, dividing, and abundant—totality out of which (Shakespeare or post—Shakespearean) subjectivity appears’. And so finally we arrive at what the ‘improvisation of Enlightenment’ means. We must view Moten as situated at this discursive and epistemological nexus where Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence and valorization of writing, the structural linguistic Saussurean orientation vis a vis language as differential structure, the psychoanalytic onto-existential drama between the Subject and the prison house of language (that is, the incommensurability or irretrievability of the two), and the Wittgensteinian inexpressibility of language without extralinguistic effects converge. The ‘novelty’ of the black radical intellectual, cultural, and artistic tradition derives from this improvisatory thrust, this radical (dis-)orientation: ‘what occurs in the new black music it the sixties...is the emergence of an art and thinking in which emotion and structure, preparation and spontaneity, individual and collectivity can no longer be understood in opposition to each other. Rather the art itself resists any interpretation in which these elements are opposed, resists and designation, even those of artists themselves, that depends on such oppositions’. Improvisation, according to Moten, is where (following Derrida) the ‘naive’ and ‘idiomatic’ converge. To improvise is to ‘come unprepared, unarmed; but you don’t come with nothing. You’ve got to bring something that adorns you even if it doesn’t arm you. Just a very small phrase, the noise of a phrase if it is one, just the spirit of some phrasing, the soft racket of a small accompaniment.’ Derrida, in an interview Moten cites and thinks about/through/with, vies for an ‘idiomatic’ writing that always eludes his capture, ‘idiomatic’ meaning a ‘property you cannot appropriate, something that marks you without belonging to you’. Not a ‘style’ of writing but ‘an intersection of singularities, of manners of living, voices, writing, of what you carry with you, what you can never leave behind’. In a later disavowal of improvisation by Derrida in another interview where he’s discussing psychoanalysis, Moten asserts that this disavowal ‘bears the trace, and even the hope, of improvisation’. Derrida is doomed to err from the ‘well formed question’ as he hears ‘the call of the sound of Algeria’, sees the trajectory after the question of the detour and hopes for a synthesis (a conclusion) that ‘mutes the improvisational quality’ immanent to his philosophical tradition. Derrida, and by extension the one who ‘writes’ and philosophy at large, is always already forced back to that which is its unconscious, that is, improvisation. Put another way: ‘This unconscious, or more precisely, this thing of darkness that philosophy has seemed incapable of acknowledging as its own, is improvisation.’ And ‘what one receives as a result of indirect interminable returning to what one already do had is a language of feeling’ that is, as Cecil Taylor demonstrates, a ‘personal feeling’ that is always politico-historical in character. Cecil Taylor insists on improvising because that improvisation is an expression of a feeling, his singularity, that cannot be counterposed arbitrarily to the facilities of cognition nor Reason because Cecil Taylor’s playing is never without epistemological grounding, and furthermore, that feeling is always already engendered or catalyzed by political-historical circumstances. And so this is not just a question of juxtaposing representational models between two ostensibly discreet intellectual / philosophical traditions (e.g the black radical tradition vs western philosophical tradition). Remember, Moten locates improvisation as philosophy’s unconscious, which renders any notion of origin, temporal succession, linear causality, and telos inoperative. And so hopefully we’ve sketched out some elaboration of what an ‘improvisation of Enlightenment’ might consist of or look like or entail. In concrete terms, it might begin with an apprehension of the conceptual or intellectual inventory of the western philosophical tradition, but it doesn’t stop there: it also consists of a derridean ‘overturning’, that is, the ‘reading’ practice(s) that has come to characterize or constitute that which is colloquially referred to as ‘deconstruction’. But we see that Moten’s method is not reducible to deconstruction: while not historically materialist in form / content (that’s not the aim or subject of this particular essay), we also see that Moten’s method is not exactly incompatible with concrete historical analysis: remember, Cecil Taylor’s artistic practice, his performance, his improvisation, functions as political-historical response; His practice is analogous, in this way, to this deconstructive practice of ‘reading against the grain’. It is, again, following Derrida, a practice of trace, but it is also profoundly sedimented in the organizational principles and procedures constitutive of the black radical tradition. In locating improvisation as philosophy’s unconscious, Moten situates himself in an avowedly black radical intellectual tradition that takes as its point of departure the question of essence and ground, or more specifically, the ‘essence’ of the Negro (following Nahum Chandler, and by extension, Du Bois, Fanon and Wynter).  In a word: the problem of the Negro as a problem for thought, Blackness as Western Philosophy’s perennially unthought.

[azspot]

The message is that surveillance capitalism’s new instruments will render the entire world’s actions and conditions as behavioral flows. Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts, and situations. In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable 'it.' From the vantage point of surveillance capitalism and its economic imperatives, world, self, and body are reduced to the permanent status of objects as they disappear into the bloodstream of a titanic new conception of markets. His washing machine, her car’s accelerator, and your intestinal flora are collapsed into a single dimension of equivalency as information assets that can be disaggregated, reconstituted, indexed, browsed, manipulated analyzed, reaggregated, predicted, productized, bought, and sold: anywhere, anytime.

Shoshana Zuboff

[pcttrailsidereader]

Hiking as Pilgrimage

I just finished Christopher Ives book Zen On the Trail Hiking as Pilgrimage. What a wonderful book! Ives is a teacher, Zen master, and author who shares a compelling story for any of us who like to be in nature. He interweaves past experiences with more current ones. One thing I appreciated was the author’s depth of experience. He tells his story from the vantage point of his present home in New England and experiences over the years in Japan and the Pacific Northwest. Christopher Ives is a great writer who blends Zen practice with walking in nature. He shares both what he has learned through his practice and his years of hiking along the AT, in the North Cascades, and Japan. He sees these experiences as pilgrimages and I couldn’t agree more.

The author relates his story to us in an easy relatable way. Ives takes us on a weekend hiking trip near the AT in New Hampshire. Here he links Zen thinking and practice to hiking and camping in the ‘wilderness’ as well as later experiencing nature in his own neighborhood. In these settings Ives shares with us how these experiences are all a form of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage takes the seeker; us, away from daily life. Isn’t that the truth when we think about our times in nature?

The pilgrim’s path often leads to sacred mountains but can also lead us to our own backyards or nearby open spaces. Ives introduces us to the anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner describes three stages or rites of passage we move through when we go into nature. This framework relates directly to pilgrimages . The first stage is separation, when the pilgrim leaves society and all the associated rules and worries. The second stage leads a person to liminality. This has a Latin root meaning threshold or border. In this space, ordinary life has been walled off and the person is in transition between time and place that is set apart from normal life. Our status in normal life goes away, as pilgrims carry few possessions, wear simple clothes, display humility, and do many of the same things as their fellow pilgrims. This is the realm of the austere, may require abstinence, self-sacrifice, not to mention perseverance through pain and fatigue. As a hiker this idea and descriptions really resonate with me. As I read Ives book it became clearer that my time on the PCT is quite liminal. I have felt and experienced every one of those descriptors many times.

In what Ives describes as ‘the leveling of people apart from ordinary social life’ can lead to a deep feeling of communion with others. I have found this to be true at so many different trailheads on and off the PCT. As I step away or out of my everyday life I realize that those I hike with or meet along the way may not all be the same or come from the same places, but one thing we will share is this journey will transform us. Our transformation is linked to the liminal state we find ourselves in away from our ordinary lives in society. This transformation roots itself in openness and sustained curiosity.

My dear friends and hiking partners Jim and Rees have concluded that our curiosity, openness, attentiveness, along with our responsiveness to each other and our experience as a whole is the essence of our shared pilgrimages. What each of us does with these experiences when we finish our hike and eventually leave each other is the third stage in what Turner terms “reaggregation”. We return to our ordinary lives changed, with new insights, stories, and goals. Often when we get to the place where we will leave the trail there is a feeling of satisfaction and cleansing (and that’s before a shower). We feel most alive and are tuned in to a calm and quiet we found on the trail. Our reaggregation continues as we each go our separate ways and feel a deep connection having shared so much with each other. 

I will share more of the many nuggets I discovered in Christopher Ives book, Zen on the Trail Hiking as Pilgrimage in future posts. For now, I hope you will reflect on your own experiences along with those you know and wonder more deeply about what comes from your times in nature. It can be the smallest thing, such as noticing the beetle dragging off something much larger as you pass over them along your journey. It can also be the sight of the sun setting on a distant Mount Rainier from your campsite on the flanks of Mount Adams. It can even be the deep laughter that you only experience when you are where you are in nature with your fellow pilgrims. When we put ourselves in nature, it seems we are on the pilgrim’s path.

[rum--lad]

To work in this way, identifying yourself as kin to birds, insects and wild animals (for you consume the remains, taking the body closer to the edge of the void), is to accept your practice as inclined toward the occult and the shamanic, for you venture into cryptic domains.  You think you disturb the bones, and in so doing it is a desecration, but perhaps you arrive at a point of transition and liminality where established rules of linear time and the barriers between species no longer apply.  The sky burial, more or less complete in nature, offers an opportunity for reaggregation exclusive and of benefit to the human world and its relationship with the animal.  The bodily remains become the ritual subject, and the artist, traversing the unknown of the animal night, takes on, with due caution and sensitivity, this responsibility to regenerate and restore.

[pixellpad]

The Mentor Me Mode

Narrative sequencing, drafts, format, datalogic

Manner of presentation

Everything will be random, spurious. We re bound to commit mistakes, bloopers but the percentage of failure is lessened.

Scope

Salesforce

The percentage seeing the possibility of doing a sales task will be reaggregated into a seperate group and will hold another session as we go along. Spot hiring applies. Recruitment agents will be with us as we go along, will likewise be introducing themselves to everyone in the Forum. We will not be sailing along singularly in this ocean of opportunity and change. There are other boats wiggling their maststaffs nearby. Simply putwe are never alone. As the main purpose of our journey is to develop our skills, add more knowledge and kindle a renewed sense of hope, the mindset of these third parties is to find that missing element to form part of their ,own.Systems needs to be supportive of another Our arrangements must remain complimentary. The task seems impossible, until it is done.

[polixy]

Few U.S. sermons mention abortion, though discussion varies by religious affiliation and congregation size

Few U.S. sermons mention abortion, though discussion varies by religious affiliation and congregation size;

(Eamon Queeney/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Abortion remains a contentious issue among U.S. Christians. But when millions of churchgoers file into the pews each week, what do they really hear? A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that just 4% of sermons shared on U.S. church websites in the spring of 2019 discussed abortion even once – and when they did, it was rarely mentioned repeatedly. Still, pastors who broached the topic were nearly unanimous in their opposition.

Although they are relatively rare, these mentions of abortion add up over time: Christian churches that shared their sermons online posted an average of nine sermons each during the eight-week study period – and roughly one-in-five of those congregations (19%) heard at least one sermon that mentioned abortion. To arrive at these conclusions, the Center analyzed nearly 50,000 sermons shared online or livestreamed by more than 6,000 U.S. churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019 – a period that included Easter.

While the database is not representative of all U.S. Christian sermons, it offers a window into what many Americans hear each week from the pulpit. (See this report for details about how the analysis was conducted.)

How we did this

This report used computational methods to measure whether – and how often – pastors discuss abortion in their sermons. To arrive at these findings, Pew Research Center harnessed computational tools to identify, catalogue and analyze 49,719 sermons shared online or livestreamed by more than 6,431 U.S. churches. These sermons were delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019. Some findings using these data were originally published in the report “The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons.” To find these sermons, researchers used a computer program that navigated through U.S. church websites in search of the sermons they shared online – these sermons were then downloaded, transcribed to text (if necessary) and analyzed. The congregations were found using Google Places, a close relative of Google Maps. For more information, see the original report’s methodology.

To determine what share of sermons discussed abortion, researchers used workers on Mechanical Turk to label 250-word-long segments of sermons for whether they did or did not mention abortion. Researchers labelled segments, rather than whole sermons, because whole sermons are generally too long for an individual worker to read in one sitting. Researchers then used these data to train a machine learning model, which determined whether the remaining segments mentioned abortion. Segments were then reaggregated to determine whether sermons mentioned abortion or not. For more information, see this post’s Methodology.

The findings suggest that roughly one-in-five congregations in the evangelical Protestant, historically black Protestant and Catholic traditions heard at least one message that touched on abortion during the study period. Meanwhile, only one-in-ten mainline Protestant congregations heard about abortion during the same period.

Sermons that mention abortion rarely focus entirely on the topic. When sermons are broken into smaller segments of 250 words (the median sermon runs 5,502 words), three-quarters of all sermons that mention abortion do so in just one segment. As a result, only 1% of all sermons across the whole database discuss abortion in more than one segment.

Congregations with fewer members tend to hear more references to abortion than those with larger memberships. For instance, 13% of mainline Protestant congregations with 200 or fewer members heard at least one reference to abortion over the eight-week study period. But that share falls to 8% among mainline Protestant congregations with more than 200 members.

In online sermons that do reference abortion, the pastors’ perspectives are almost unanimously in opposition to the practice. When researchers individually examined 60 sermons that discussed abortion, only four seemed to support access to abortion services. As a result, sermons that express a positive view of abortion rights were too rare to identify across the whole database.

Across religious traditions, clergy use distinctive terms in sermons that discuss abortion

Clergy in each major Christian tradition tend to use certain words disproportionately in sermons that mention abortion, compared with sermons by clergy in the same tradition that do not mention the topic. For instance, evangelical sermons that mention abortion are more likely than those that do not to include words like “womb,” “heartbeat” and “pornography.”

Pastors in the historically black Protestant tradition tend to use distinctive words and phrases like “pregnancy” and “child [of] Jesus” in sermons that touch on abortion. Catholic pastors use phrases such as “pro-life,” “good Catholic” and “church teaching” in these sermons, while mainline Protestant sermons that mention the subject disproportionately use the term “evangelical(s).” (Words and phrases in this analysis were converted to their roots, and common words such as “your,” “and” or “but” were excluded.)

One evangelical pastor argued in favor of a focus on life both before and after birth, saying, “I like what somebody said recently: ‘from the womb to the tomb.’ It’s not just enough to care about children in the womb, but to care about all life all the way to the grave.”

Meanwhile, a mainline Protestant pastor argued that religious leaders had shied away from speaking against what he perceived as social ills: “Why go to church? They don’t really condemn anything. … Should we take a strong stand against sin, against abortion, against the gay agenda, against divorce, against the love of money, against pornography, against drugs, against hate?”

Sermons that discuss abortion also are more likely to mention specific books of the Old Testament (also known as the Hebrew Bible) by name, even as they reference the New Testament (Christian biblical texts originally written in Greek) at roughly the same rate as other sermons. Indeed, 72% of all sermons that mention abortion reference a book of the Old Testament, compared with 60% of sermons overall.

Methodology

To collect the sermons analyzed in this study, researchers followed a process outlined here. To determine whether each sermon contained a reference to abortion, researchers segmented each sermon into 250-word snippets, then hired workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to examine them. Each segment was independently coded by five separate workers, and in order to label a sermon as mentioning abortion, researchers required at least three of the five to identify it as such (this threshold was chosen because it maximized agreement between Mechanical Turk workers and researchers on a set of 151 documents). The Cohen’s Kappa – a measure of inter-coder reliability – between Mechanical Turk workers and researchers was 0.96.

The documents coded by workers were oversampled based on the presence of the following key phrases: “abortion,” “fetus,” “pregnant,” “unborn,” and “womb.” Many documents that contained these phrases mentioned abortion, a fact that allowed the model to learn other key phrases in addition to the ones used to oversample documents. All model statistics are “weighted,” meaning that they adjust for this oversampling.

This process generated 3,151 labeled segments, 675 of which mentioned abortion and 2,476 of which did not. Researchers then trained an extreme gradient boosting classifier on those labeled segments, which performed well: Precision was 0.89 and recall was 0.92 when calculated using fivefold cross-validation. Researchers also calculated Cohen’s Kappa between the model’s decisions and those of human judges by comparing its performance on the 151 segments that were coded in house. The Kappa value was 0.90, indicating that the model largely agreed with human decisions. This model was then applied to 250-word segments of every sermon in the database, which were then aggregated back up to the sermon level for analysis.

; Blog – Pew Research Center; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/29/few-u-s-sermons-mention-abortion-though-discussion-varies-by-religious-affiliation-and-congregation-size/; https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FT_20.04.20_abortionSermons_featured.jpg; April 29, 2020 at 01:08PM