From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865549613 ISBN 13: 9780865549616

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2004

Synopsis

In From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion, nine scholars of religion and theology explore the relationship between religion and sports in American popular culture and the role of sports as religion.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph L. Price is professor of Theology and executive assistant to the president at Whittier College. His previous publications include two volumes coedited with Donald W. Musser--A New Handbook of Christian Theology and The Whirlwind in Culture: Frontiers in Theology in Honor of Langdon Gilkey--and an essay in The Theology of Langdon B. Gilkey: Systematic and Critical Studies (Mercer, 1999).

Other volume contributors are: Charles S. Adams, Lois Daly, Tom Faulkner, Paul Christopher Johnson, Lonnie D. Kliever, James Mathisen, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, and Peter Williams.

From Publishers Weekly:

Contending that athletics boasts many of the trappings of religion stadiums are sacred spaces, sporting events are rituals and so forth nine scholars apply sophisticated religious-studies theory to sports. The essays are uniformly disappointing, producing no new insights about either church pews or baseball diamonds. James A. Mathisen splits academic hairs when he argues that sport is best understood not as a civil religion (as many scholars have claimed) but as a folk religion. Lois Daly draws an unconvincing, obscure parallel between Indiana coach Bob Knight and a Benedictine abbot. Tom Faulkner's essay on ice hockey starts with a clever and promising title ("A Puckish Reflection on Religion in Canada") but goes downhill from there. He suggests that the "hockey priesthood['s]" apparel is best understood as vestments: "not simply... on-ice uniforms, but... the widespread use of jackets and blazers off the ice." Faulkner also notes that hockey players are "in some radical sense... 'called out' of the everyday world." Hence hockey can be "understood... as a religion." By this logic, practicing law and working in Hollywood are religions, too. As the work of people like Robert Higgs makes clear, creative scholars can draw interesting connections between sports and religion, but those connections are nowhere evident in the pages of this book. (Mar.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0865549613
• ISBN 13: 9780865549616
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252
• Editor: Price Joseph L