Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
PBR: A Healthy Appreciation
PBR: A Healthy Appreciation
Mar 19, 2025 2:17 AM

Fr. Kevin’s talk raised a number of questions about the status of sports in our society. Here are some of them:

Have we lost a healthy sense of leisure and play, to the point where sport and entertainment have e similar to a religious ritual or duty?Is the desire to win at all costs inherent to sports? What’s the point of playing a game if not to win?Why don’t religious leaders criticize athletes who cheat, such as flopping Italian soccer players? Are such standards culturally conditioned?Are there different virtues associated with different sports, depending on the rules and culture of the particular sport?Do big business and corporate sponsorships entice athletes to cheat?

Obviously, there were not many clear answers to these questions, but Fr. Kevin did his best to encourage an healthy appreciation of sports, and reminded us that while St. Paul most probably was not an athlete himself, he definitely knew that living with, in and for Christ is the greatest prize of all.

I think most thinking sports fans are aware of the ambiguities of their passion and try to keep it in check. But at the same time, the desire to pete, and win helps us recognize that excellence/virtue actually exist. This recognition is essential to fighting the good fight against placency and mediocrity; it is also essential to the entrepreneurial vocation.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
More on Gerson and Evangelical Politics
As a follow-up to John Armstrong’s post, I point you to this excellent response to Gerson’s article by Joe Knippenberg at No Left Turns (HT: Good Will Hinton). Knippenberg raises the relevant question whether “the ‘new evangelicals’ he describes will have sound practical judgment to go along with their decency and moral energy.” I think it’s true that the potential is there for the “new” evangelicals to go the Jim Wallis route, who is proclaiming the election as “a defeat...
Food for Thought: Andrew Sullivan and Retrofitted Christianity
The Hugh Hewitt/Andrew Sullivan kerfuffle has been mentioned a few times on the PowerBlog (here and here, for example), and while the dust has largely settled from that event, the issues that it raised continue to be addressed in various corners of the blogosphere. The most interesting (and mentary that I’ve read on Sullivan and his new book is by the Rev. Dr. Mark Roberts, who serves as Senior Pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church in Irvine, California. Roberts’ critique is...
The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 7
This post concludes my series on the largely forgotten catholicity of Protestant ethics, with a few brief remarks and reflections. My goal for this series, as stated in Part 1, was to show that voluntarism and nominalism are not the same thing, that two important Reformed theologians (Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi) had more than a passing interest in Thomism (or intellectualism as Pope Benedict XVI referred to it in his now famous Regensburg address), and that evangelicals need...
Conservatives and the GOP
In an op-ed last week, Acton senior fellow Jerry Zandstra argues that in Michigan, even though the GOP lost, conservatives won. In “GOP loses, but conservatives win in Michigan” Zandstra explains the phenomenon that “Conservative positions won in the ballot initiatives but Republican candidates lost.” Some more evidence that Republicans have generally abandoned conservative economic es from Cato@Liberty’s examination of the voting records of ousted GOP lawmakers (HT: AmSpec Blog). The conclusion? “The great majority of losing Republicans were economic...
The Art of Freedom
From time to time, e across something that forces me to stop, step back, and marvel at the wonder of human creativity. The movie below is one of those things. Airplanes are monplace that we often take them for granted. Here at Acton, many of my colleagues are regularly catching flights to all sorts of points on the globe, and it isn’t unusual for me to hear some grumbling about the airlines and the annoyances e along with modern air...
Reflections on ETS Day One
Things were busy here yesterday at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Washington, D.C. With over 1800 registered attendees and 600+ papers being presented, the ideas are flying fast and furious. My paper on Bonhoeffer’s views of church and state went well. A few people asked me to send them copies of the paper, so expect a series of blog posts containing the text ing days (once I clean up the textual apparatus). One highlight of the...
Chicken Little circa 2006
The UN has been busy updating the Chicken Little fable into a contemporary context. You know the story where the little chick runs around crying, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” In this edition, however, the looming disaster is (predictably) climate change. The es courtesy of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (HT: NewsBusters). Sedna, the Mother of the Sea The Gaia motif is perhaps the most revealing part, as in “Tore and the Town...
The Social Aspect of the Gospel
In preparing for the paper I’m giving this week on Bonhoeffer’s views of church and state, I ran across the following quotes, which nicely illustrate his view of the gospel and its relation to alleviation of social oppression and suffering. In his essay, “Ultimate and Penultimate Things,” he writes, It would be blasphemy against God and our neighbor to leave the hungry unfed while saying that God is closest to those in deepest need. We break bread with the hungry...
Catholic Social Teaching and Health Care
Susan Stabile, a law professor at St. John’s University and a contributor to Mirror of Justice, analyzes the current state of health coverage in the United States in light of Catholic social teaching in this article. I have quibbles here and there along the way, but on the whole the approach and the conclusions are sound. She is probably right that Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) have limited value, though my reasoning would be a little different. I would say that,...
This Week at ETS
A number of us who are affiliated with the Acton Institute in various ways will be traveling to Washington, D.C. this week to attend the 58th annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, “Christians in the Public Square.” I hope to bring you updates from some of the more interesting and engaging presentations. With that in mind, for your interest below are the papers scheduled to be given by Acton scholars: Wednesday, November 15 E. Calvin Beisner, “Scientific Orthodoxies, Politicized...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved