Editor’s Note to 2:1

Editor's Note to 2:1 Terry Shoemaker When Eric Bain-Selbo and I started imagining what an academic journal focusing on religion and sport could look like, we both strategically sought to bring a level of innovation. One of the first items we imagined was an inclusion of a conversation piece in each journal edition. These conversations, we refer to them as Current Issues Roundtables, would be a place to include voices from scholars studying the intersections of religion and sport but also a place to highlight practitioners and lay peoples' voices. In previous editions, we learned about the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, a case related to individual religious practices in publicly-funded spaces, and a conversation with former football players Hamza Abdullah and Matt Ware regarding practicing faith in the National Football League (NFL). In this issue, Cody Musselman leads a discussion centering on pedagogical practice in teaching religion and sport courses in university settings. As the discussants note, offering a sport and religion course tends to be very attractive to undergraduate students, and their conversation is rich with approaches, topics, and resources for such courses. As an instructor at Arizona State University who teaches an undergraduate Religion and Sport course, I am thrilled to have such rich content for me to reimagine and expand my course at ASU. Another form of innovation we sought was to provide a space for different types of scholarship and reflections. In this issue, we include Dr. Kate Mroz's theological ethnography focusing on endurance athletes' perceptions of religion, religious institutions, and their athletic pursuits. In her study "Church of the Sunday Long Run," she not only unearths the ways in which endurance athletes conceptualize running, swimming, and cycling as spiritual or religious practices, but how these same athletes consider their athletic communities as a replacement for their religious communities. As a trained theologian and "running theologian" herself, she is interested in how running communities can speak to the Christian church (if the church is willing to listen). The paper unfolds different types of trauma and how running and endurance sport provides a solace that the religious community failed to supply. Her study reminds us that scholars can straddle the theoretical with the prescriptive in certain cases and blend the theological with social scientific approaches to sport and religion. End Page 1 Likewise Dr. Eric Bain-Selbo's piece "The Healthy Minded, Sick Souls, and the Cubs: The Spiritual Life of a Fan Base," demonstrates how the scholar's fandom informs and influences their academic pursuits. Eric's contributions to the field of religion and sport, including co-editing the International Journal of Sport and Religion, are well known; yet, this piece, which we've included in a new Memoir section of the journal, pulls back the curtain to show how his Cubs loyalty positions him within a broader fanbase longing for success but expecting failure. In sum, the long plight of the sick-souled Cubs fan illustrates a type of religious-like devotion mirroring William James' typologies of religious people. The new memoir inclusion in this journal spotlights a thematic call for the next edition of the IJSR. For edition 2:2, we'd like to hear theoretical and reflective pieces related to fandom and the scholar. Just as religious studies scholars debate the impact of personal religious commitments to the study of religion, we want to invite pieces thinking about the impact of personal fandoms on the scholar's work. This could include considerations regarding sports fandom as scholarly motivation or interference or how methodologies might be problematized for scholars who are also team fans. This edition concludes with reviews of new works in sport and religion, which shows the strong connections between religiosity and sporting fervor. New historically-based publications like Bill Clinton at the Church of Baseball: The Presidency, Civil Religion, and the National Pastime in the 1990s and Marty Glickman: The Life of An American Jewish Sports Legend continue to unfold the rich history of religion and sports in American culture. In a more popular fashion, Deepak Chopra and Joe Leavin's Religion of Sports: Navigating the Trials of Life Through the Games We Love...