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Showing posts from February, 2016

Triple Jeopardy: A Christian Sociology of Sport?

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Imagine a father comes home from work to find that his 13 year old son has taken apart the toaster in order to study what is going on inside. The son, after hours of prodding and poking has now got a proper grasp of the inner workings of the machine. He could easily explain to his dad how the thing works. Perhaps he even has a future in the grilled bread industry. But his dad scolds him for breaking the toaster and sends him to his room. Welcome to the life of a sociologist. Firstly, the father is like the uncritical individual, possessed by his own certainty. The toaster is a toaster and as long as it serves the function ascribed to it then it is to be regarded as complete, unalterable or even good. He sees no worthwhile extension of its productivity or of its function. It does what he bought it to do: why fiddle? The father does not appreciate deconstruction, he only sees destruction. And the boy is the sociologist. He knows that to discover how something works it is often nece