From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion »

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.

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 Cahners Business Information.