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Showing posts from September, 2015

The Protestant Play Ethic

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Do Protestant Christians today apply a 'work ethic' to their sporting endeavour? In this post I'll briefly be considering the possibility of a Protestant Play Ethic. Weber's Thesis Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains a seminal text in the field of sociology, by virtue of the audacious range of his thesis as well as the subtlety and carefulness of his explication. Put crudely, Weber argued that Calvinism (a branch of Reformed Protestant Christianity) provided a worldview suited to the development of modern world order, and that this accounted for the rise of capitalism in Germany and much of Western Europe, rather than in Japan, for example. Critiques of Weber's thesis, including my own in a previous post , are numerous, varied and often contradictory. (For more on these contradictions as well as a synopsis of these critiques see Giddens' introduction to the 1976 edition of the English translation of The Protestant Ethic)...
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Billy Sunday: The Baseball Evangelist

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"Preaching" by BPL - originally posted to Flickr as Preaching. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Preaching.jpg#/media/File:Preaching.jpg Billy Sunday was a preacher and a Baseball player and one of the most powerful men of his generation. Born into poverty in 1862, his father died when the young William Ashley Sunday was just five weeks old. His mother, who, after a few years of support from her father, could no longer provide for her children, sent Billy and his elder brother to an orphanage in Iowa. Billy was fleet of foot and athletic as a young man and made his way into professional baseball with the Chicago White Stockings (now the Cubs) by the time he was 21 years old. He was reputedly the first man to round the bases in 14 seconds flat, and held the record for stolen bases for some years until it was surpassed by the legendary Ty Cobb.
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Popular posts from this blog

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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