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Notes
1 I should note from the outset that I am knowingly blending two terms—ritual and liturgy—together in what follows. Many liturgical theologians and scholars of ritual would perhaps object to this; liturgy is a deeply theological word, they might note, aligned with the Christian tradition, while ritual is an outsider’s term meant to connote the anthropological phenomenon of patterned ceremonial behavior that cuts across all cultures. The conclusions about the latter, in other words, ought not to be applied to reflections about the former without the proper caveats. I want to recognize the wisdom of that now, but to continue blending the two in what follows all the same. I do so because I think even the seasoned liturgist will appreciate that what I draw from Smith is something that participants in Christian liturgy—whether as presiders or as recipients—will recognize as a common impulse within our liturgical life together. I am indeed playing fast and loose with my terms, but I think, if you will forgive a rather on-the-nose metaphor, it is a play worth running in this case.
2 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 56.
3 Smith, Imagining Religion, 61.
4 Smith, Imagining Religion, 62.
5 Smith, Imagining Religion, 63.
6 This is something like the position found in Andrew Edgar, “Sport as Liturgy: Towards a Radical Orthodoxy of Sport,” Studies in Christian Ethics 25, no. 1 (2012): 20–34. However, I find Edgar’s outlook on sport to be far too pessimistic when he insists that sport can only be a negative liturgy whose meaning is ultimately illusory.
7 Lincoln Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport (London: SCM Press, 2014), 88.
8 Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport, 93.
9 Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport, 94.
10 Lincoln Harvey, “Someone Must Lose: A Theology of Winning in Sport,” in Theologies of Failure, ed. Roberto Sirvent and Duncan B. Reyburn (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2019), 51–2.
11 Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport, 95.
12 Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport.
13 Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport.
14 Lincoln Harvey, “A Theology of Sport: On the Rebound,” First Things, November 17, 2014 https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/11/a-theology-of-sport-on-the-rebound. I should also note here that within liturgical theology is a long-standing vein that sees liturgy itself as a form of regulated play. For more on that, see Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Is Liturgy Ludic? Distinguishing between the Phenomena of Play and Ritual,” Religions 12, no. 232 (March 2021).
15 Interestingly, this seems to imply that golf is not a sport since, in Harvey’s definition of competition as involving a winner and a loser, golf must be made to be competitive through the tournament format.
16 Harvey, “A Theology of Sport.”
17 Harvey argues that thinking of God as choosing to have less control within sport is part and parcel of imagining God as acting on an entirely different causal plane. So Harvey would insist that he is not imagining God as essentially playing Madden in the sky during football games, as some who insist on God having complete control over sporting outcomes must. For Harvey, we have no notion of a control that has a heavier touch in one place and a softer touch in others but is still based in the same eternally willed action. Thus, it must be an utterly different kind of causation. This is, again, an innovative solution, but this vision of God’s action as not in competition with our actions does not support Harvey’s argument as he might think it does. See Jason M. Smith, “Praying to Win: On the Involvement of God in the Outcomes of Sport,” Theology 123, no. 5 (2020): 329–36.
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Notes on contributors
Jason M. Smith
Jason Smith is a Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Postdoctoral Fellow at Tougaloo College.