An engaging look at the historical conditions surrounding America’s secular, on-field religions.
A brief but insightful cultural history of American sports that links religious elements to the rise of organized games.
Balmer, the chair of religion at Dartmouth, argues that the four major American team sports—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—link to social and cultural movements in play at the time of their foundings. There were industrialism, imperialism, entrenched (and anti-immigrant) nationalism. There were also technological developments such as the railroad and the telegraph, which “made both intercollegiate and professional leagues possible, allowing the travel of teams from one community to another and news about the contests to filter back to hometowns.” An imported British movement called “Muscular Christianity” also held, in essence, that a weak Christian soldier wasn’t going to win the war against evil for God. Balmer’s case studies are interesting and well documented. Though football was the product of Protestant schools after the Civil War—one that had the martial impulses of warriors on the battlefield—it was quickly adopted by Catholic schools such as Notre Dame, helping reduce some of the distance between the two strains of faith. It’s interesting to note, too, that James Naismith, hailed by one coach as an “inventor of basket-ball, medical doctor, Presbyterian minister, tee-totaler, all-around athlete, non-smoker, and owner of vocabulary without cuss words,” was both a college chaplain and a coach. Balmer discerns a fascinating link between hockey’s penalty box and the Catholic Church’s confessional booth, where a sinner can “acknowledge and atone for his transgression.” He doesn’t always effectively forge links between religion as such and sport, but he provides plenty of useful insights on the role of zeitgeist, as when he aligns football in the South to the desperate need to reestablish a sense of manhood following the defeat of the Confederacy. He also contrasts North America’s growing urbanism to the implied pastoralism of baseball and its contemporaneous vision of a “Garden of Eden, a lost, halcyon paradise.”
An engaging look at the historical conditions surrounding America’s secular, on-field religions.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4696-7006-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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