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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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