"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play…it is war minus the shooting."
Religion and Sports
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Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassover, NewYork: Routledge, 2014. ISBN 978-0-415-64532
The book looks at the relationship between religion and sport – similarities and differences. While the title is “religion” not “Christianity”, most of the religious examples come from the Christian faith.
The introductory chapter notes five approaches to sport and religion: the historical approach, the sociological, the economic approach, the theological approach and the personal or autobiographical approach. The authors quote Joseph Price who suggests five ways in which religion and sport have interacted:
• religion and sports in conflict
• sports comingling with religion
• religion conscripting sports
• sports co-opting religion
• sports supplanting religion
The meat of the book is in seven chapters called:
• Belief
• Sacrifice
• Relics
• Pilgrimage
• Competition
• Work
• Redemption.
The approach of the book is to take a word and apply it to religion and to sport and see what similarities and differences emerge. This is done through a common structure in each chapter: eg
• Belief in the Bible
• Belief in Sports
• Belief and Religion Today
• Belief in Religion and Sports
While the book contains a lot of interesting material, no coherent whole emerges. A reader hoping that the book will help them understand the relationship between sport and Christianity or begin to develop a theology of sport, is likely to be disappointed.