Sport, Ethics and Philosophy

Sport, meaning and religion

Sports are meaningful activities for many people today, just as they have always been throughout the history of civilization. People enjoy testing their physical limits and derive pleasure and meaning from sports. Sporting activities and, more broadly, physical exercise are also being used across society as part of policies on ‘preventive health’: to reduce healthcare costs and keep medical care accessible for everyone in an ageing society. However, in approaching sport from this perspective, sport and movement sciences primarily focus on biological, physical, and kinesiological aspects, which do not account for the athlete’s lived experience or the meaning-making elements of sport. Additionally, sociological approaches to sports that claim these activities have replaced religion since the 1960s often fail to fully address the meaning-making elements and experiences within sports mentioned earlier. Secularization and modernization do not adequately account for the existential aspect of our moving bodies, such as how humans create and find meaning through their physical being in the world. Such approaches also restrict the concept of the sacred to traditional religion and religious practices, overlooking other ways to reimagine the sacred and transcendence. This raises the question of what meanings traditional religious terms and concepts can contribute to the interpretation of phenomena and experiences in contemporary sport. We think, for instance, of individual experiences of elite athletes, such as transcendence, ecstasy, or a sense of community, but also of 'sacred objects' in sport, as well as the community-building elements of sport that show important similarities with those of religious practices.

Much research has been conducted on the relationship between sport and religion, but in this special issue, we focus specifically on a philosophical analysis of the religious vocabulary in sport. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (2013), for example, argues somewhat controversially that religions are best understood as shared training practices, with their corresponding coaches and club changes. What is striking here is that religious concepts such as priests, dedication, and conversion still hold rich meaning for interpreting sport. As such, this special issue addresses religious concepts, such as the sacred and incarnation, and how they can be significant for understanding contemporary athletic practices. Phenomenological and theological writers like Blaise Pascal, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, more recently, Richard Kearney and Michel Serres emphasize how we experience our relationship to the world through our senses and physical being in the world, while this very encounter touches meaning or transcendence in everyday life.

Moving beyond a purely biological approach to sport and the idea that sports are a new religion, this special issue explores how religious concepts can be encountered in the embodied practice of sport, thereby capturing the athlete’s lived experience and the community-building elements of sport. By bringing religious concepts and philosophical frameworks into dialogue, we invite contributions that illuminate the deeper layers of meaning through which athletes and individuals understand and transform themselves through their engagement in sport.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

-          Metamorphosis, vulnerability, and forms of embodied enhancement

-          Intimacy, incarnation, sacrament, and the sacred in athletic practice

-          Transcendence and meaning-making in contemporary sport (amateur or elite)

-          Phenomenological accounts of embodied experience

-          Religious or theological interpretations of sporting practices

-          Perspectives from philosophical anthropology, philosophy of science or technology, philosophy of the body, and political philosophy

-          Sacred objects of sport, such as the ball, the prize, or the stadium

-          Analyses combining theoretical frameworks and lived experience

References:

-          Harvey, L. (2014) A brief theology of sport. London: SCM Press.

-          Johnson, M. (2007) The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

-          Kearney, R. (2021) Touch: Recovering our most vital sense. New York: Columbia University Press.

-          Kearney, R. and Treanor, B. (eds.) (2015) Carnal hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press.

-          Pascal, B. (2011) Pensées. Opuscules et lettres. Ed. P. Sellier. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

-          Serres, M. (2012) Variations on the body. Tr. R. Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Press.

-          Sloterdijk, P. (2013) You must change your life. Tr. W. Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press.

-          Stokvis, R. (2013) Lege kerken, volle stadions. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

-          Weil, S. (1952) Gravity and grace. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.