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Showing posts from August, 2015

To the Promised Land: Brazilian Footballers in Europe

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The religious landscape of Brazil has undergone seismic change in the last few decades. Where once the Catholic Church held unquestioned primacy of position, the decline in her influence over the nation has been sharp. It is claimed that in the 1940s 99% of Brazilians were Catholic, while the figure in 2013 was reported to be down to just 63%. In its place has risen the Protestant Church, and one broad denomination in particular - Pentecostalism. The most followed brand of Protestantism in Brazil is a version of neo-Pentecostalism which lays a central importance on profound personal experience(s) of the Holy Spirit alongside the accumulation of material wealth as a sign of God's favour.
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Luther, Calvin & Weber

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Max Weber argues that ideas are more significant in shaping society than are the economic conditions of life. This is opposed to the doctrines of classical Marxism. Karl Marx believed that the material world produces the ways people think about their existence. Max Weber believed that the ways people think about their existence produces the material world. Marx was a materialist; Weber an idealist. Weber’s philosophical idealism led him to search for a set of beliefs, or ideas, which produced a worldview consistent with the development of the social setting in which he was living. Alongside this, Weber believed that he had observed a correlation between the emergence of modern capitalism and the predominance of Protestant (specifically Reformed, Calvinistic) belief. The very existence of this correlation has been substantially challenged – if not refuted – by numerous writers in the fields of history, economics and sociology. Nevertheless, and not without good reaso...
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More than a Crest: the meaning of the Barça badge

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The changing design of Barcelona's club badge teaches us about how sport is an integral part of wider society, not simply a meaningless addendum.  In 1899 at the club's founding it was decided to use the city coat of arms as the club's badge. FC Barcelona's regional ties have long been a fundamental part of its identity, and when the club produced its own unique badge in 1910, key symbolism from the city's crest was retained. The Cross of St. George 1910 crest St George, is not only the patron saint of England, but also a significant icon in numerous regions of Spain. In Catalonia, as in England, he is the noble slayer of dragons, the moral crusader, the rescuer of damsels; in short, God's man on the earth. In a culture saturated with Catholicism the symbolic act of wearing George's cross is of great relevance. The selection of the Cross to form the Barça crest is a means to tie the club to a heritage which - albeit mostly invented - enables the...
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The Supremacy of Scripture and Francis Schaeffer’s Line.

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The Christian church in the West has abandoned the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture. Notice what I did not say. I did not say that we have abandoned the doctrine of the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture (though some have). I said we have abandoned the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture. Let me explain how this has come about, and what difference it makes. Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There is a favourite book of mine. In it he argues that Western man has, over a period of several centuries, become isolated from himself, from truth and from God because he has given up the search for coherence and unity in his view of his existence. Having done so, modern Western man has replaced the search for coherence with an acceptance of a dichotomy. The dichotomy is the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational, between the natural and the spiritual. Schaeffer argues that this dichotomy can be understood to have produced a line...
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Michael Polanyi and the best ever goal.

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"There is no real substitute for a ball struck squarely and firmly". So says Billy Bragg in the song A Lover Sings, and anyone who has played football (soccer, if you must) knows what he means. You know what it's like to make the perfect connection with the ball. You just know. But what is it that enables us to 'just know'? That's what this blog post is about. Think about the last time you hit the perfect strike and sent the ball screaming into the back of the net. (Okay, point taken. Just imagine it.) What did it look like? How did it feel? Did it sound like a thud, or was it some other kind of sound? Were you aware of your surroundings? The opposition? Teammates? It's kind of hard to say, isn't it? We need some way of thinking this through, so let's start with an example, to which we can refer. Here is a short video clip of the best goal ever. (You heard me.) More than we can tell I wonder what the goalscorer Zinedine Zidane would...
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