Religion and Sports

Catalog description

Religion and sport in America are both long-held and passionately maintained cultural components. The first part provides a framework for understanding scholarly analyses and approaches regarding the intersections of religion and sport primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries. Indeed, religious sentiments and doctrines have played and continue to play an important role in creating today's American sporting culture. The second part seeks to understand particular arguments framing sports as a space of religious expression or more boldly as a religion in the United States. To gain various perspectives, students engage with various materials including scholarly works, recorded lectures and podcasts, popular culture videos and conduct qualitative interviews with student athletes.