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.
Many people are passionate about sport, yet few give thought to its role and importance in their lives - let alone its relationship to Christian faith. This book examines the potential of sports and challenges readers to consider how it relates to their deepest passions, behaviours, and actions, while providing newcomers to the field with a framework to help consider the connection between sports participation and faith-based values. Featuring academic writers from a range of disciplinary fields, including philosophy, theology, sports studies and education, Sport and Christianity: Practices for the Twenty-First Century sheds insight into the meaning of sports for Christians as participants and as practitioners. Divided into practises for the mind, for the heart, and for moral life, the numerous topics include the value of play in sports, sports as a means for dialogue between faith traditions, sports as a place to cultivate virtue and the Christian spiritual life, and prayer and religious experiences in sports The result is a text that promotes new ways of thinking about the sports-Christianity relationship while at the same time developing a deeper understanding of the place of sports in our everyday lives.
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 and Christianity examines sport and Christianity from a variety of historical perspectives, with the main focus on the period from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The book is not limited to a narrow definition of Christianity, but rather encompasses a wide range of denominations, related philosophies and viewpoints. The contributors are international, and the geographical range of their chapters is equally wide, extending, for example, from China to Argentina, and from Australia to Poland. Some chapters focus on a single sport such as gymnastics, soccer or Australian Rules football, while others look at modern sports more generally. Different methodological and theoretical approaches have been adopted, as contributors enter the debates on, for example, cultural imperialism, gender, changing Christian attitudes to leisure, or the intersection between religion, politics and sport. Demonstrating the many-sided significance of the relationship between Christianity and Sport, this book is ideal for scholars of Sport History and Christianity. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
“Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under conditions of modern life—some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time. But it also provides a warning that a religion unable to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars against an enveloping secular culture is destined for oblivion. “Glenn Olsen’s book could hardly be more pivotal or insightful. Confronting the growing amnesia regarding culture’s religious origin and transcendent purpose, Olsen proves both a masterful cartographer of modernity and a visionary of a culture that encourages and enables us to seek beyond ourselves.” —Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus “A brilliant book. It rests on an amazing amount of scholarship that is wide-ranging in history, literature, art, science, music, theology, and philosophy.” —James Hitchcock, professor of history, St. Louis University
Virtual enterprises and mobile computing are emerging as innovative responses to the challenges of doing business in an increasingly mobile and global marketplace. In this rapidly changing environment, it is critical to focus on the fundamental technological aspects that enable the concept of pervasive computing. Mobil Computing: Implementing Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies is designed to address some of the business and technical challenges of pervasive computing that encompass current and emerging technology standards, infrastructures and architectures, and innovative and high impact applications of mobile technologies in virtual enterprises. The various articles examine a host of issues including: the challenges and current solutions in mobile connectivity and coordination; management infrastructures; innovative architectures for fourth generation wireless and Ad-hoc networks; error-free frequency assignments for wireless communication; cost-effective wavelength assignments in optical communication networks; data and transaction modeling in a mobile environment, and bandwidth issues and data routing in mobile Ad-hoc networks. The book is organized around four categories of mobile and pervasive computing and technologies: (1) business and management, (2) architecture, (3) communication, and (4) computing. The first three chapters focus on the business aspects of mobile computing and virtual organization. The fourth chapter lays out an architecture for a fourth generation wireless network. Chapters 5 and 6 are geared towards communication technology, both wireless and wireline. Chapter 7 is a taxonomy of data management environments in mobile computing and Chapter 8 is a review article on data and transaction management and research directions in this area. Finally, Chapter 9 addresses various routing strategies for the seamless switching between mobile hosts in an Ad-hoc network. The primary audience for this book is industry practitioners, university faculty, independent researchers and graduate students. The articles have a mix of current and successful efforts, innovative ideas on providing the infrastructure support, and open problems-both conceptual and experimental. People in the academic as well as industry can benefit from this book. All the articles have gone through a peer review process. It is anticipated that the book will act as a single, consolidated source of information on the cutting edge of pervasive computing technologies.
Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families. Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.
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
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.
Introducing Religion, 4/e explores the different ways of looking at religion in the twenty-first century. A broad overview to religious studies as a discipline introduces students to the various subjects of religion. Introducing Religion teaches readers how to think in academic religious studies and its main areas, including: sociology of religion, psychology of religion, history of religion, religion and art, ethics, and more. The fourth edition has been expanded with new chapters exploring topics of contemporary interest: myth, spiritual paths, religion and popular culture, religion in the computer age, religion and war. Contemporary topics engage today’s students, relating the topics to the changing world around them.
