The Prophetic Dimension of Sport


Book Description

Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of Religion and Sport, this book examines the prophetic dimension of sport, to arrive at a better understanding of the nature of sports in the United States. By detailing and analyzing particular sports, a portrait of sport as an important space for social and political critique emerges. Sport is indisputably an important cultural phenomenon in the United States. Each year millions attend sporting events, track the statistics and lives of sports stars, collect memorabilia, engage in fantasy sports, and play various sporting games. But increasingly, sport is also a space for public articulations regarding social and political issues within the United States. What are we to make of these particular articulations? What do they tell us about the nature of sport in the United States? How are these social and political critiques formed? Why do sporting voices seem to carry more weight at this moment in history? Ideally suited for use in undergraduate and graduate courses, this book offers a new way of thinking about the connection between sport and religion in a secularizing society. By analyzing various sports and particular historical moments, the chapters supply a unique example of the relevance of sport as it pertains to social and political critique.




Youth Sport and Spirituality


Book Description

Unsportsmanlike behavior by student athletes or parents at youth sporting events happens with regularity these days. Much recent research reveals that young people are dropping out of sport at alarming rates due to the often toxic elements in the culture of youth sports. The timely, innovative essays in Youth Sport and Spirituality present a wide-ranging overview that draws on resources from Catholic spiritual and theological traditions to address problems such as these, as well as opportunities in youth sport in the United States. The book consists of two sections. In the first, prominent scholars in philosophy, psychology, theology, and spirituality reflect on how youth sport contributes to the integral development of the person and his or her grasp of spiritual values. The second half of the book consists of chapters written by coaches, athletic directors, and specialists working with youth coaches. These practitioners share how their approaches to working with youth in sport contribute to the integral development of their players and their openness to transcendent values. The essays examine coaching as ministry, youth sport and moral development, and how parents can act as partners in youth sports, among other topics. The book will interest coaches, athletic directors, and youth ministers in Catholic elementary and high schools in parish settings, as well as undergraduate and graduate students in education who are preparing to teach in Catholic schools. Contributors: Patrick Kelly, SJ, Daniel A. Dombrowski, Nicole M. LaVoi, Mike McNamee, Clark Power, David Light Shields, Brenda Light Bredemeier, Richard R. Gaillardetz, Kristin Komyatte Sheehan, Dobie Moser, Jim Yerkovich, Sherri Retif, James Charles Naggi, and Edward Hastings.




Sports and Christianity


Book Description

This interdisciplinary text examines the sports-Christianity interface from Protestant and Catholic perspectives. In addition to a "systematic review of literature," field-pioneering contributors such as Michael Novak, Shirl Hoffman, Joseph Price and Robert Higgs address a wide range of topics from the sporting world, including biblical athletic metaphors, disability, evangelism, professionalism and celebrity, humility and pride, genetic enhancement technologies, stereotypes, sport as art and British and American historical analyses of sport and Christianity. Insightful chapters from Scott Kretchmar, one of the world’s leading philosophers of sport, and Father Kevin Lixey, the head of the Vatican’s ‘Church and Sport’ office (2004-), add further depth and breadth to this book, making it accessible and interesting to academic and practitioner audiences alike. Within the context of this relatively new and rapidly expanding area of inquiry, this collection provides a unique and important addition to the current literature for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and serves as a point of reference for scholars of theology and religious studies, psychology, health studies, ethics and sports studies. The book may also be of interest to physical educators and sports coaches who wish to adopt a more "holistic" and ethical approach to their work. As modern sport is often intertwined with commercial and political agendas, this book offers an important corrective to the "win-at-all-costs" culture of modern sport, which cannot be fully understood through secular ethical inquiry.




Christianity, Race, and Sport


Book Description

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity, Race, and Sport examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed include: the sanctification of baseball player Jackie Robinson; the domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; religious expressions of athletes in the NFL; treatment of African American tennis player Serena Williams; Colin Kaepernick and his prophetic voice. This accessible and conversational book is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching religion and race or religion and sport for the first time, as well as those working within the sociology of sport, sport studies, history of sport, or philosophy of sport.




Sports and Christianity


Book Description

This interdisciplinary text examines the sports-Christianity interface from Protestant and Catholic perspectives. In addition to a "systematic review of literature," the contributors, who include many of the pioneers in the field, address a wide range of topics. These include biblical athletic metaphors, disability, evangelism, professionalism and celebrity, humility, the Vatican's perspective on sport and genetic enhancement technologies.




The End(s) of Religion


Book Description

Eric Bain-Selbo argues that the study of religion-from philosophers to psychologists, and historians of religion to sociologists-has separated out the “ends” or goals of religion and thus created the conditions by which institutional religion is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western culture. There is ample evidence that institutional religion is in trouble, and little evidence that it will strengthen in the future, giving some reason to believe that we are in the process of seeing the end of religion. At the same time, various cultural practices have met in the past and continue to meet today certain fundamental human needs-needs that we might identify as religious that now are being fulfilled through what Bain-Selbo calls the “religion of culture.” The End(s) of Religion traces the way that the very study of religion has led to institutional religion being viewed as just one human institution that can address our particular “religious” needs rather than the sole institution to do so. In turn, ultimately we can begin to see how other institutions or forms of culture can function to serve these same needs or “ends.”




Sports, Religion and Disability


Book Description

This ground-breaking book provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between sports (and leisure), religion and disability. In the shadow of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, at which athletes that were both able-bodied and disabled, provided an extravaganza of sporting excellence and drama, this text is a timely and important synthesis of ideas that have emerged in two previously distinct areas of research: (i) ‘disability sport’ and (ii) the ‘theology of disability’. Many of the elite athletes at this global sporting mega-event often explicitly displayed their religious beliefs, and in turn their importance in the context of sport, by observing different religious rituals, and or, utilising the multi-faith sports chaplaincy service. This raises a whole range of unanswered questions with regard to the intersections between sports, religion and disability, which to-date has been under- researched. Examples of subjects addressed in this text include: elite physical disability sport--Paralympics; intellectual disability sport--Special Olympics; reflections on the illness narrative of the cyclist Lance Armstrong through the lens of the theology of ‘radical orthodoxy’; the application of biblical athletic metaphors in understanding modern conceptions of disability sport; the role of sport and spirituality in the rehabilitation of injured British Military personnel, and; the importance of sports and leisure in L’Arche communities. This book begins a critical conversation on these topics, and many others, for both researchers and practitioners. This book was based on two special issues of the Journal of Religion, Disability and Health.




Prophecy and Its Cultic Dimensions


Book Description

This collection of eight essays deals with a wide range of historical, literary, and methodological issues. First, what were the links between the cultic and the prophetic personnel? Did prophets have ritual/cultic functions in temples? Did prophetic actions and/or utterances play a role in the performance of the cult? What were the ritual aspects of divinations? Second, how do literary texts describe the interaction between prophecy and cult? Third, how can various theories (e.g. religious theory, performance theory) enable us to reach a better understanding of the interplay between divination and cultic ritual in ancient Israel and the wider ancient Near East? Marian Broida explores the ritual elements as described in the biblical accounts of intercession. Lester Grabbe revisits the important question of whether cultic prophecy existed in the Jerusalem temple in ancient Israel. Anja Klein maintains that while Psalms 81 and 95 may indirectly testify to a form of cultic prophecy, they do not themselves constitute cultic prophecy. Jonathan Stökl discusses the notion of "triggering" prophecy and suggests that enquiring of Yhwh may in itself be understood as a kind of ritualised behaviour. John Hilber considers the performance of the rituals that accompanied prophetic affirmation of victory in the Egyptian cult. Martti Nissinen looks more broadly at the question whether prophets in the ancient world functioned as ritual performers. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer investigates the priests' mediating and predictive functions as depicted in the Deuteronomistic History. Alex Jassen argues that Jews in the Second Temple Period perceived the priests and the temple to be a new locus of prophetic activity.




Religion and Sport in North America


Book Description

From athletes praising God to pastors using sport metaphors in the pulpit, the association between sport and religion in North America is often considered incidental. Yet religion and sport have been tightly intertwined for millennia and continue to inform, shape, and critique one another. Moreover, sport, rather than being a solely secular activity, is one of the most important sites for debates over gender, race, capitalism, the media, and civil religion. Traditionally, scholarly writings on religion and sport have focused on the question of whether sport is a religion, using historical, philosophical, theological, and sociological insights to argue this matter. While these efforts sought to answer an important question, contemporary issues related to sports were neglected, such as globalization, commercialization, feminism, masculinity, critical race theory, and the ethics of doping. This volume contains lively, up-to-date essays from leading figures in the field to fill this scholarly gap. It treats religion as an indispensable prism through which to view sports, and vice versa. This book is ideal for students approaching the topic of religion and sport. It will also be of interest to scholars studying sociology of religion, sociology of sport, religion and race, religion and gender, religion and politics, and sport in general.




Sport in the City


Book Description

Sport is seen as an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional planning. Related programmes have moved to the forefront of agendas for cities of the present and future. This has occurred as the barriers between so-called ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture continue to disintegrate. Sport is now a key component within strategies for the cultural regeneration of cities and regions, a tendency with mixed outcomes - at times fostering genuinely democratic arrangements, at others pseudo-democratic arrangements, whereby political, business and cultural elites manipulate a sense of sameness and unity among their fellow citizens to smooth the path for the pursuit of what are actually vested interests. Almost any active enactment of a ‘sports city of culture’ risks divisiveness. Recognizing controversies, with both potentially positive and negative outcomes, this book examines sport within contexts of urban and regional regeneration, via a number of rather different case studies. Within these studies, the role of sport stadium development, franchise expansion and sports-fan (and anti-sport) activism is addressed and articulated with issues concerning, inter alia, public funding, environmental impact, urban infrastructure and citizen identity. The ‘sport in the city’ project commenced as a research symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and number of the essays originate from this occasion. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.