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.
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.
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
Like religion, playing and watching sports is a deeply meaningful, celebratory ritual enjoyed by millions across the world. The first scholarly work designed for use in both religion and sports courses, this collection develops and then applies a theoretically grounded approach to studying sports engagement globally and its relationship to modern-day issues of violence, difference, social protest, and belonging. Case studies explore the place of sports in mainstream faiths, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, and lesser-known religious groups, particularly in Africa. It covers football, baseball, and basketball but also archery, soccer, bullfighting, judo, and track. Essays reflect all skill levels, from amateur to professional, and find surprising affinities among practices and cultures in locations as disparate as Germany and Japan, Spain and Saudi Arabia. Thoroughly examining a range of phenomena, this collection fully captures the unique overlap of two universal institutions and their interplay with human society, politics, and culture.
Religions and Sports: The Basics introduces the many connections and interactions between religions and sporting activities. Readers will gain a foundational understanding of how to approach religions and sports analytically, theoretically, and methodologically. The book uses multiple relational frameworks to examine probing discussions around religious expressions in sports, the social connections of religions and sports, the mirroring of sport and religious devotion, and the discourse between religious ideas and leaders and professional athletes. Supplemented with numerous case studies and engaging exercises, it guides students through approaching research inquiries within the intersection of religion and sport for the first time. With lively discussion on contemporary sports including skateboarding and pickleball, it is a must-read for all students of Religions and Sports and Religion and Popular Culture, in addition to sports fans more broadly.
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.
