DivRebecca T. Alpert is professor of religion at Temple University. She is the author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition, which won a Lambda Literary Award and Award for Scholarship from the Jewish Women's Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology; Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball; and Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism./div
Religion and Sports in American Culture explores the relationship between religion and modern sports in America. Whether found in the religious purpose of ancient Olympic Games, in curses believed to plague the Chicago Cubs, or in the figure of Tim Tebow, religion and sports have been and are still tightly intertwined. While there is widespread suspicion that sports are slowly encroaching on the territory historically occupied by religion, Scholes and Sassower assert that sports are not replacing religion and that neither is sports a religion. Instead, the authors look at the relationship between sports and religion in America from a post-secular perspective that looks at both discourses as a part of the same cultural web. In this way each institution is able to maintain its own integrity, legitimacy, and unique expression of cultural values as they relate to each other. Utilizing important themes that intersect both religion and sports, Scholes and Sassower illuminate the complex and often publicly contentious relationship between the two. Appropriate for both classroom use and for the interested non-specialist, Religion and Sports in American Culture brings pilgrimage, sacrifice, relics, and redemption together in an unexpected cultural continuity.
This book examines the relationship between sport and religion with regard to twenty-first century topics such as race, fandom, education, and culture. The contributors provide new insights into the people, movements, and events that define the complex relationship between sport and religion around the world. A wonderful addition to any academic course on religion, sports, ethics, or culture as a whole.
This text presents the best of the literature available on the relationship between sport and religion. The collection includes ground-breaking studies as well as recent articles from popular and scholarly publications. Sport and Religion is organized into four parts that - consider the case for and against sport as religion, - examine the potential of the sport experience as a path to religious insight, - analyze the significance of the pervasiveness of religious gestures in sport, and - explore the impact of religious views on perceptions and behaviors in sport.
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.
The connection between popular culture and religion is an enduring part of American life. With seventy-five percent new content, the third edition of this multifaceted and popular collection has been revised and updated throughout to provide greater religious diversity in its topics and address critical developments in the study of religion and popular culture. Ideal for classroom use, this expanded volume gives increased attention to the implications of digital culture and the increasingly interactive quality of popular culture provides a framework to help students understand and appreciate the work in diverse fields, methods, and perspectives contains an updated introduction, discussion questions, and other instructional tools
When Race, Religion, and Sport Collide tells the story of Brandon Davies’ dismissal from Brigham Young University’s NCAA playoff basketball team to illustrate the thorny intersection of religion, race, and sport at BYU and beyond. Author Darron T. Smith analyzes the athletes dismissed through BYU’s honor code violations and suggests that they are disproportionately African American, which has troubling implications. He ties these dismissals to the complicated history of negative views towards African Americans in the LDS faith. These honor code dismissals elucidate the challenges facing black athletes at predominantly white institutions. Weaving together the history of the black athlete in America and the experience of blackness in Mormon theology, When Race, Religion, and Sport Collide offers a timely and powerful analysis of the challenges facing African American athletes in the NCAA today.
Like no other nation on earth, Americans eagerly blend their religion and sports. This book traces this dynamic relationship from the Puritan condemnation of games as sinful in the seventeenth century to the near deification of athletic contests in our own day.
Readers are introduced to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches used to understand religion – including sociology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology – and how they can be used to understand sport as a religious phenomenon. Topics include the formation of powerful communities among fans and the religious experience of the fan, myth, symbols and rituals and the sacrality of sport, and sport and secularization. Case studies are taken from around the world and include the Olympics (ancient and modern), football in the UK, the All Blacks and New Zealand national identity, college football in the American South, and gymnastics. Ideal for classroom use, Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon illuminates the nature of religion through sports phenomena and is a much-needed contribution to the field of religion and popular culture.
Prebish offers a thoughtful look at sport as a religious experience and argues that sport has become an American religion. The first section of the work contains three chapters that provide a definitional, theoretical, and methodological frame for examining sport as religion. The five chapters that follow, each written by an authority in the field, treat different aspects of the religious dimension of sport. These chapters represent the most important writings on sport as a religious experience, and each author offers a full and thoughtful discussion rather than a cursory overview. A final chapter by Prebish closes the work. The first chapter of the book challenges traditional assumptions about religion and encourages the reader to reconsider what religion is. The second chapter examines the difficulty of defining sport, and the third probes the close relationship between sport and religion. The anthology that follows contains chapters that examine religion and sport from sociological, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. A concluding bibliography lists material for further reading.
