Current Issues: Teaching Religion and Sports

Current IssuesTeaching Religion and Sports Philip Arnold, Annie Blazer, Cody Musselman, and Zach Smith Keywords sports, religion, muscular Christianity, Colin Kaepernick, assignments, institutions, kinesiology DISCUSSANTS Annie Blazer Annie Blazer is an Associate Professor at William & Mary where she teaches courses on religion in America, including a class on religion and sports in the U.S. She is the author of Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (NYU Press, 2015), an ethnography of the religious experiences of Christian athletes. Philip Arnold Philip Arnold is an Associate Professor of the Department of Religion at Syracuse University and a core faculty member of Native American and Indigenous Studies. He is the founding director of the Skä·noñh–Great Law of Peace Center at Onondaga Lake. He is the author of several manuscripts, including The Gift of Sports: Indigenous Ceremonial Dimensions of the Games We Love (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2012). He teaches courses on the doctrine of Christian discovery, colonialism and conquest, and religion and sports from a Native American perspective. Zach Smith Zach Smith is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State, Harrisburg in the kinesiology program. As the program's resident humanities scholar, he teaches courses on the sociology of sport, sports ethics, and research methods in sports studies. His research and publications focus on the intersections of religion and sport, particularly Christian Mixed Martial Arts. End Page 41 Cody Musselman Cody Musselman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research on fitness and religion in American culture focuses on branded exercise regimens like CrossFit and SoulCycle. She teaches courses on religion and wellness and sport and religion. She is also the Current Issues editor of ISJR. Cody Musselman The pairing of sports and religion is quite intuitive for some students, but others are drawn to a class like "Religion and Sports" because it seems like an odd pairing. How you frame your "Religion and Sports" course, and how do you introduce students to these concepts as being in relation to each other? Phil Arnold At Syracuse, we're in the heartland of the Haudenosaunee, and even though we're a private university, we have the Haudenosaunee Promise scholarship program, which means that we probably have the most Native American students—certainly the most Haudenosaunee students—in the country. Oftentimes, they are lacrosse players because Lacrosse has its origins among the Haudenosaunee. Lacrosse is a cosmological game for the Haudenosaunee, and I get a lot of lacrosse players in my Sports and Religion class. These students are curious about the origins of the game. The Haudenosaunee students have played since they were three, so there is already a deep sense that Lacrosse, or Dehoñtjihgwa'és as the Onondaga call it, is a kind of ceremonial practice. It's called the Creator's game or the medicine game. If you're a lacrosse enthusiast, there are echoes of this even in the professional game. In a way, it's easier to talk about the religious connection, or religious-like connection, when talking about sports. Because there are students in the class that are connected to the game, that becomes like the hook. Annie Blazer I feel like institutional context matters so much for how we frame what we do. I'm in a completely different institutional setting where I'm very unlikely to run into Native American lacrosse players. But I am quite likely End Page 42 to run into Christian athletes who have affiliated their sports life with their religious life, similarly, since they were very young. The way I frame the course is thinking about U.S. context and thinking about the role that religion plays in the U.S. and also the role that sport plays in the US. These things can reveal underlying cultural values, some of which we might like, and some of which we might want to talk about how we could improve. I try to really take a critical approach to the intersection of religion and sports. But, as you noted, Cody, for some students, especially the students that are coming to me with a...