RELI 267 - Religion, Culture and Society

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

May be taken more than once when the content changes.

Topic for 2014/15a: Sports and Religion. To many, the connections between sports and religion are evident and powerful. Essayist David Foster Wallace once described watching Roger Federer play tennis as a “religious experience.” Religion scholar David Chidester speaks of the “church of baseball.” Phil Jackson, the winningest basketball coach in history, refers to the “spiritual lessons” in “sacred hoops.” To others, however, this connection is at best tenuous and at worse degrading to religion. These critics ask, How can something as worldly and meaningless as a game be considered sacred? This class explores the contested connections between sports and religion. This class is less interested in determining whether sports really are or are not religious. This class is much more interested in considering what it says about religion and what it says about sports when we think of them as related. How does asking whether sports are religious lead us to reconsider our notions of “sports” and “religion”? Students are asked, for example, whether the Olympics or the Super Bowl functions as religious ceremony. We take up the question of whether something sacred happens in competition, or whether being a fan is akin to being a religious adherent. Each of these helps us think through the way the sacred, competition, and deep loyalty are constituted. We also examine a variety of social, political, and psychological intersections of sports and religion, for example, in Muhammed Ali’s conversion to Islam or Tim Tebow’s prayerful pose on the football field. In examples like these, we confront the way sports has the power to establish, reinforce, and also challenge religious and political identity. Mr. Kahn and Mr. Jarow.

Open to all students.

Two 75-minute periods.