Sociological studies of sport have established their subject matter as significant to a wide range of sociocultural concerns. Despite a broad consensus about its global importance, however, the reasons for the particular, even ‘extraordinary’, societal importance of sport today remain deeply contested. Most studies account for it by highlighting its entanglement within a range of secular phenomena including state building, rationalization, biopolitical regulation, and the ‘controlled-decontrolling’ of bodies and affects. Occupying a more marginal position within the discipline, others focus on the religious or quasi-religious characteristics of sport. Our paper suggests that neither of these positions, on their own, is best placed to capture the nature and implications of sport’s particular centrality to social life. Proposing a new theoretical approach to the subject that places competing conceptions of what we refer to as the ‘sporting sacred’ at the center of discussion, we outline, via a reconceptualization of the writings of two major classical theorists, Durkheim and Weber, a number of contrasting modalities through which sport is prized within contemporary society. These modalities, which embrace both secular and religious phenomena, can, we suggest, provide new insight into the divergent paths along which sports are being ‘pulled’ and steered in the modern era.

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Re-conceptualizing sport as a sacred phenomenon

Implicit religion and the highly-identified sports fan: An ethnography of Cleveland sports fandom

Abstract The religious landscape of North America is different from other regions of the world in that not only is there a lack of a highly visible religious elements, but also the idea and practice of pilgrimage and ritual travel is not as pervasive as in Europe and Asia. However, there are many human-built and natural spaces marked by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Indigenous peoples, and members of other faiths which are subject to either formal or informal pilgrimage-like travel. Visits to these sacred sites have intensified with the rise and expansion of tourism after World War II, conflating pilgrimage-like travel with tourism. As such, there has been an expansion of the term ‘pilgrimage’ to describe the visits of people to sites of historical, political and/or pop culture importance. This paper examines the changing religious and ritual landscapes in North America, and examines the case of tourism and pilgrimage to Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario, to show how ritual journeys in North America have become more inclusive over time. Recommended Citation Olsen, Daniel H. (2016) \"Ritual Journeys in North America: Opening Religious and Ritual Landscapes and Spaces,\" International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 4. doi:10.21427/D7D43F Available at: https://arrow.dit.ie/ijrtp/vol4/iss1/4 DOI 10.21427/D7D43F  Download

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Ritual Journeys in North America: Opening Religious and Ritual Landscapes and Spaces

The sport industry came to a standstill after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Major sporting events were postponed or canceled in lieu of the tragedy and for a week, while the nation mourned, the country went without sports. For many of the leagues it was the first extended hiatus for a non-labor dispute in nearly a century. On September 17, Major League Baseball returned, the first sport to resume, and when the games did recommence there were noticeable changes. Throughout this period, the New York Times, one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers, produced a sports section in every edition. The purpose of this study was to examine how the New York Times framed sport’s response to 9/11. Framing theory provided the theoretical framework of this examination, which incorporated a textual analysis of each article printed from September 12, 2001 to December 31, 2001. Additionally, four journalists from the Times were interviewed to provide supplementary context to the framing of sport’s response to tragedy. The culmination of this methodological procedure produced five frames: diminished significance of sport, sport as a distraction, united community symbolically moving onward, logistical understanding, and loss of innocence. Each contributed to the overall framing, or understanding, of 9/11. Diminished significance of sport defined the re-evaluated importance of sport in contrast to the tragic realities illuminated by terrorism. The sportswriters often referred to sport as a couple hours away from reality, assuming the role of a distraction. Many of the sporting events following the attacks held ceremonies or tributes that were heavily reliant on the use of symbolism, which was representative of the nation’s feelings. There were also logistical measures described in order for sport to navigate the upheaval of scheduling caused by 9/11. Finally, there was a demarcation of preand post-9/11 infused with loss that shaped the loss of innocence frame.

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Reporting Crisis: An Analysis of the New York Times’ Sports Section Following the Tragedies of September 11, 2001

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

A Match Made in Heaven? Southern Evangelicalism and the Rise and Fall of Agrarian Populism in the 1890s

Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South – By Eric Bain‐Selbo

At the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, the “Sacred Ground” exhibit celebrates the game’s most noteworthy parks. “This exhibit,” remarked the Hall of Fame’s president, “captures that magical connection that forms between fans and their ballpark.” Similar examples of sacred themes intermingling with athletic places appear elsewhere in the world, from the soccer field at Aztec Stadium in Mexico City, to the fairways of the Old Course at Saint Andrews in Scotland. This essay uses sacred space as an interpretive category to investigate the religious dimensions of sports. Channeling insights from cultural geographers, religion theorists, historians, and cultural theorists, it examines major sporting venues in different sections of the world and identifies the tactics used by fans, players, and curators to enshrine their favored people, teams, and events.

The Shrines of Sport: Sacred Space and the World’s Athletic Venues

such as the Hawaiian Henry Obookiah and the Cherokee Catherine Brown. Even so, more than a whiff of condescension rose from those hagiographies, and in the case of Shidyaq, according to Makdisi, “his embellished martyrdom underscored only the barrenness, not to say barbarity, of local culture” (153). And in the hands of missionary chroniclers later in the nineteenth century, Shidyaq’s story “increasingly idealized America and orientalized the East” (142). For Henry Harris Jessup and most of his contemporaries at the Syria mission, the “original millennial enthusiasm, which had bound missionaries and heathen together in a race against time . . . was superseded by a modern enthusiasm according to which certain advanced races were destined to lead backward races” (171). Standing in sharp contrast to this missionary perspective is the contemporaneous Arab relation of Shidyaq’s life by another Maronite convert to evangelical Protestantism, Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883). A teacher, journalist, and leader in the native Beirut Protestant community, he cast Shidyaq as a tragic hero, a figure whose striving for intellectual freedom exemplified Bustani’s liberal hopes for an Arab renaissance and a future of cultural dialogue and political equality among Christians and Muslims as well as East and West. Artillery of Heaven stands as a signal contribution to the growing body of North American and British scholarship that is remaking the history of missions and missionaries. Moving beyond the spent debates over whether western missionaries were saints or cultural imperialists, Makdisi and this company of likeminded scholars train their attention on those who were the objects of conversion and their agency in shaping colonial encounters. Readers will find much to admire in his eloquent and balanced book and much to ponder in its evocation of the earliest beginnings of the complex relationship between the United States and the Middle East.

Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement . By Joe L. Coker. Religion in the South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. x + 332 pp. $50.00 cloth.

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS: CATHOLIC REFLECTIONS ON THE AMERICAN PROPOSITION – By John Courtney Murray

Sports would be another location where myths linger in the stories told about the movements of athletes and the devotion of fans. Names such as Ted Corbitt figure prominently in this refiguring of the running boom’s mythology. The importance of Corbitt’s recovery is that it demonstrates a collective effort to address the lasting problem of racial inequity within the sport of distance running. In American history, the conventional image of a pioneer relates to the nineteenth-century agent of westward expansion, the breaker of frontier soil, and the remover of native populations. For Corbitt, running was more than a means for fitness and competition, naming it instead as the perfect setting to feed his “fierce competitive spirit.” Corbitt witnessed and participated in these institutional struggles, but he also dealt with racism in his daily life. The mythology of American distance running might also better incorporate the voices of Black women into the story. 

Arthur Remillard

Papers

Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South – By Eric Bain‐Selbo

The Shrines of Sport: Sacred Space and the World’s Athletic Venues

Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement . By Joe L. Coker. Religion in the South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. x + 332 pp. $50.00 cloth.

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS: CATHOLIC REFLECTIONS ON THE AMERICAN PROPOSITION – By John Courtney Murray

Ted Corbitt