Joe Price's Anthem Tour

Art Remillard

"When baseball functions as a civil religion," observes Joe Price in Rounding the Bases, "its true believers--the passionate fans and players who shape their worldviews and daily routines around their devotion to the game--experience a kind of sacramental rejuvenation in the game itself." Joe makes it no secret that he is a "true believer." The book concludes with a thoughtful recollection of his own baseball "conversion" narrative. And this summer, as research for his next book, Joe will sing the national anthem at over 100 minor league baseball parks across the nation.

If you're interested in following along, check out his website , Facebook page, and blog. Joe's wife is also coming along for the ride (they're traveling in an RV), blogging on her side of the story.

Here's one of Joe's dispatches from Florida...

At St. Lucie, a twin pillared sculpture made from remnant steel at Ground Zero graces the entry to the ballpark and pays tribute to the victims of the Twin Towers’ attack. Created by Patrick Cochrane, the piece was donated by retired New York City firefighters who live in the St. Lucie area.

As I entered the ballpark to sing for Florida's Mets, the relic reminded me of the consummate performance of the national anthem by Daniel Rodriguez, then a New York City policeman, at Yankee Stadium shortly after the 9/11 tragedies.

While the crowd’s response to my anthem rendition in St. Lucie was enthusiastic, the most expressive gestures and comments came from Mets players and a vendor. As I walked the gauntlet past the Mets dugout right after I had sung, manager Pedro Lopez gave me thumbs up and said “Good job,” followed by third-baseman Richard Lucas reaching over the dugout railing to shake hands with me. A short time later, the vendor who was roasting pretzels over a charcoal fire near the backstop breezeway expressed great appreciation for the anthem itself. He offered that his wife, Laura Mercado, had auditioned a couple of days earlier to sing for the Mets and hopes to sing soon for one of the games.

A similar connection took place the following day in Jupiter while I was eating a delectable lunch at Le Metro in the Abacoa Town Center. Tiara, the waitress, recommended the broth-based mushroom soup and, as an entrée, grilled scallops, presented over tabouli, sliced tomatoes, and a fan of avocado slices dressed with an herbed balsamic vinegarette. I still savor that meal. When she asked what business had brought me to town, I indicated that I’d be singing for the Hammerheads a few hours later. “Wow!” she exclaimed and then recounted how some years ago when she had been living in Newport Beach, California, her daughter Nicole Gero had sung the national anthem for the Freedom Bowl game.

It’s quite simple: Anthem performances bring people together.

Stick Your Beer in the Snow: The Theology of the Frozen Tundra

Paul Harvey

I wasn't going to clutter this blog with exultation in the victory of the only Socialist/Communitarian Franchise in professional sports, the Green Bay Packers (whom I have loved since the 1967 Ice Bowl, my young Baptist self not realizing then that Vince Lombardi -- subject of a recent Broadway show -- was a Jesuit-trained coach at Fordham before being brought in to rescue the hapless Packers), but I have to quote just one gem from this piece of seasonal theology, from someone interviewed at the team's victory celebration at Lambeau Field today, where below-zero wind chills. hardly deterred the faithful:

The weather's fine. I can barely feel it," Ken Hampp, 23, of Appleton, said in the Lambeau parking lot as he sipped a Budweiser, before it froze. "That's my favorite thing about winter. You can just stick your beer in the snow.

Word.

Oh, and congratulations to the biggest Cheesehead friend of this blog, Kip Kosek, author of the memorable article "Brett Favre, Catholic Hero" (from 2008, in case you are wondering, before the more recent ugly Favre revelations). Actually the final sentences of the piece are even more appropriate given those revelations: "For every choice, there's a consequence. Wisconsin's Catholics understand this, and weep."

What do Puritans, Shakers, Food, Beer, and Running Shoes Have in Common? Eden, of Course!

Art Remillard

“There was this idea that we are the new Adam and the new Eve,” remarks Stephen Prothero in the opening scenes of PBS’s God in America. For Puritans, Eden served as a narrative anchor, a place defined by God's law, which if followed to the letter offered untold heavenly promises. And so the story goes...and goes, and goes. I haven't finished watching the documentary, so I will take Paul's word for it that there wasn't enough attention given to the “brutal” underbelly of this mythology.

Indeed, the voices of power have used Eden to coerce, exclude, and alienate. But from the margins, Eden has also emerged in contests with conventional wisdom. For example, Mother Anne Lee theorized that the real sin of Adam and Eve was sexual intercourse. Lust was the root of all evil, she insisted, and human purity required celibacy. So celibacy it was. Shakers didn't have much luck replenishing their ranks, but they did develop a countercultural way of life from an assumption that God's sexless plan appeared first in Eden.

Jump ahead to today's countercultural movements, and where might we find Eden? Documentaries like Food, Inc. and Beer Wars take aim at corporate giants and cheer the local farmer and brewpub owner. But it's a tough road for the little guy. The machine will manipulate the laws, pressure politicians, exploit workers and vendors, and create an illusion that their cheap food is safe and that their tasteless beer will make baseball interesting. To protest, I might buy my food from Eden Organic, “a principled natural food company.” Or maybe I would join a co-op run by someone like the libertarian food prophet Joel Salatin, who one admirer paraphrased as saying, “if [the United States] had invested the same resources we used to transform the plains into corn and soybeans into building thousands of ponds, we would have Eden.” And if I was in Middletown, Connecticut, I'd enjoy a microbrew in the "beer garden of Eden," at Eli Cannon’s Tap Room Restaurant.

After all of this eating and drinking, I would need to burn off some calories. I'd leave my shoes at home, though, since in Eden, everyone runs barefoot. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run has become the bible of barefoot running. While telling of the superhuman running abilities of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, McDougall also investigates the promises of running shoe companies. He concludes that their products aimed at preventing injuries have done the exact opposite. Cushioned heels, arch supports, springs, and the like. All of it weakens muscles in the feet, ankles, knees, and hips. Moreover, the downward slope of shoes forces the heel to strike first rather than the forefoot, thereby creating a heavier impact.

So, says McDougall, toss your shoes aside! And if your feet aren’t tough enough to handle the roads and rocks, you can fork over $90-$120 for a pair of Vibram FiveFingers. Sure these glorified aqua socks will garner quizzical looks from non-runners. But the payoff, according to the Vibram website, is “a more natural forefoot strike during running.” To make this whole "natural running" thing really evident, Vibram pulled the Eden card.

Open the microsite, http://www.youarethetechnology.com/ and you will see the names of various shoe technologies, all mashed together. Slowly the names disappear, behind a ghostly, echoing beat. Then two bodies appear, a man and a women, Adam and Eve, naked except for a pair of Vibrams. Printed about their bodies are slogans, “we’ll never out-engineer the human body,” “the natural running movement grows stronger by the day,” “you know how to run just like you know how to sneeze."

The website represents something of an embodied protest, a "country boy salute" waved at the major shoe companies. Of course, it also invites runners back to an injury-free Eden. Sounds good, right? Last spring my knee began bothering me and I thought surgery was inevitable. Luckily, a physical therapist recommended running barefoot in the grass. So I did, slowly at first. Eventually my knee pain went away. Then I became a Vibram convert. In November, I ran a marathon in them. I didn’t run particularly well, but my training had been interrupted three months earlier when I broke my toe. I tripped on a rock, while running in my Vibrams.

I might be "born to run," but I'm also accident prone. Yet here I am, still wearing the Vibrams (when it isn't 14 degrees and snowing), aware that the Eden mythology can't negate the rocky, uneven realities of life. That seems to be the trend. When Eden goes from imagination to the real world, things get messy.

Review: Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game

Art Remillard

Michael Zogry first learned of the Cherokee precursor to lacrosse, called “anetso,” in a class with Raymond Fogelson of the University of Chicago. The dearth of scholarship on the game surprised Zogry, who saw it as a fascinating blend of athletics and religious ritual. He read carefully the two major treatments of anetso—Fogelson’s 1962 dissertation and James Mooney’s 1890 article “Cherokee Ball Play”—and realized that there was more to the story. So when Zogry began his doctoral work, he aspired to offer a new perspective. This culminated in his innovative, compelling, and thoroughly researched, Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity.

Zogry spent four years studying anetso before seeing it in person in 1997. He arrived at the fairgrounds in Cherokee, North Carolina armed with a video camera and an intellectual suitcase stuffed with names like Bourdieu, Bell, Grimes, Geertz, Lévi-Strauss, Smith, Turner, and others. Theories raced through Zogry’s head, when suddenly reality struck—literally. As the game progressed, Zogry watched the tiny white ball float toward him and the players following closely behind. Unable to evade the rush, Zogry was knocked to the ground. This collision, the author recalls, “has continued to assert itself as a strong memory. I now think of it as a metaphor for describing my process of grappling with the relevant issues, and frankly, the limitations of my scholarly perspective to apprehend even this bit of culture in anything but a fleeting way” (15).

Specifically, Zogry came to realize that he needed a new vocabulary to discuss this game, which is more than “just a game.” In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss said that a game has a set of rules and ends when one side prevails. In contrast, a ritual, which bears resemblance to a game, aims to produce, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, “a particular type of equilibrium between two sides.” While perhaps a useful point of departure, and certainly still influential, Zogry insists that anetso does not fit neatly within this conceptual framework. It is a game, to be sure. But Zogry demonstrates that anetso connects to the most significant dimensions of Cherokee religious identity. As a result, the game "resists and problematizes" the classifications of Lévi-Strauss and the likeminded (1).

Zogry starts by looking at anetso’s relation to Cherokee cultural narratives. Among the stories he retells is one of a pre-human contest between the birds and animals, where, interestingly enough, two small animals approach the bird team and request to join their side. The team captain, an eagle, accepts the defectors and fits them with wings, making one a bat and the other a flying squirrel. When the game begins, the retrofitted rodents lead the birds to victory. According to Zogry, the Cherokee still recount this narrative, particularly to the youth, to warn against boastfulness and to emphasize the importance of “inclusiveness” and “adaptability” (48). This sense of tribal solidarity was essential during the “Era of Great Change” (1799-1838). Then, missionaries criticized the game for its perceived “heathenish” underpinnings, and calls for removal became louder and louder. Meanwhile, Zogry shows how the Cherokee defiantly played anetso, using it as “a vehicle for expression of Cherokee identity” (105).

In addition to detailing the broad narrative and social meanings of anetso, Zogry also examines rituals directly associated with the game. Preparation begins weeks in advance with public and private rituals. Ball teams hire conjurers, who enlist assistance from “other-than-human persons.” Players avoid sexual contact, while abiding by a strict dietary code that prohibits consumption of young birds, small animals, or frogs. Zogry finds that most of these traditions have carried into contemporary performances of anetso. And while most players are active Christians, few see any conflict between their Cherokee and Christian practices. This is a perspective that has developed with time, just as anetso has changed over the ages. But Zogry insists that the game is still vital, despite claims from informants that it's not. “The ethic of participation,” he retorts, “the way the players carry themselves and acquit themselves on the field, the honor of performing to the best of their ability in a contest that their ancestors once played on the same land, these remain meaningful reasons to participate for Cherokee adults and teenagers” (145).

In the book's closing pages, Zogry considers the broader implications of his findings. For example, he takes aim at Allen Guttmann, who in From Ritual to Record, argues that in the modern sporting world “the attachment to the realm of the transcendent has been severed.” Guttmann maintains that a priest or minister at a football game does not serve the same function as a shaman at an Indian ball game. Without the minister, the football game will go on. Without the shaman, there is no ball game. Zogry is unconvinced. “Football, like anetso, provides a cultural locus for a range of activities, some that can be termed ‘ritual’ and some ‘religious.’ Preliminary and postgame activities, propitiatory activities, community involvement, even gambling serve to weave the experience of this game into the social lives of players and spectators” (221). To be clear, Zogry does not advocate collapsing religion and sports. Rather, he seems comfortable with ambiguity and open to “rethinking the categories in a manner that hopefully is more accurate” (235).

Specialists in Cherokee religion, ritual studies, and religion and sports will appreciate this book. Zorgy uses an impressive array of sources, from his own fieldwork, to newspapers, manuscripts, personal journals, and travel accounts. The book is thoroughly interdisciplinary, drawing insights from historians, anthropologists, and theorists of religion, ritual, sports, and culture. Additionally, Zogry hints at possibilities for more study. He mentions that women presently play anetso, a new development in the game’s history and “a fruitful area of future research” (184). I hope that Zogry explores this "fruitful" terrain, perhaps making it part of a broader treatment of Native American women and sports. I wonder how female performances of anetso would compare with the Navajo and Apache “Sunrise Ceremony.” In this rite-of-passage ceremony, young women arise early in the morning and run out toward the rising sun and back, thereby recreating the myth of the “White Painted Woman,” a deity who reversed the aging process by moving toward the sun and melding with her younger self. The ritualized running also emphasizes strength and health, in contrast to tribal plagues such as alcoholism and type-2 diabetes. Zogry has done the intellectual work to examine this and other religious/athletic performances, and I'm eager to see where he takes us next.

“God Shaped Hole”

by Matt Sutton

While thumping Team Harvey in Fantasy Football last week, I began thinking about the relationships among celebrity, sports, fitness, and faith. My curiosity peaked when I came across reports of three very different athletes.

First, one of the blog’s favorite sports stars, Broncos bench-warming-quarterback Tim Tebow, is now more famous than ever, boasting record-breaking NFL jersey sales. He has recently joined social media. He has a new twitter account, a new Facebook page (which I cannot access because I don’t believe in Facebook) and a website. The website is fascinating, with its repetition of GB2, which stands for “God Bless and Go Broncos!” The website represents the perfect storm of God, celebrity, and the marketing of Nike and Jockey products. Amen.

Next was the story of Ron Artest. He is the NBA player who a few years ago climbed into the stands in the middle of a game in Detroit, started a brawl, and punched out a fan. Now he is a world champion with the Los Angeles Lakers (GB the Lakers!). When he was interviewed at the end of last year’s divinely ordained championship victory over the Celtics, he famously thanked his psychiatrist (who is actually a psychologist, but, as Artest explained, “psychiatrist” was easier to say in the moment).

He too has been making news. As the LA Times recently explained, “The Lakers star lends his fame to a push for funding for mental health programs in schools, using his own story to tell middle schoolers in Montebello it's all right to ask for and receive help.” Appearing before school children, “Artest talked about being in therapy from the time his parents separated when he was 13 years old. He talked about being counseled for anger issues, marriage issues, parenting issues. ‘I'm like, how can a kid in East L.A … get the same help that I got without paying so much?’ he said. Artest acknowledged the stress of being a father at age 16. He talked about growing up in a family with a history of mental illness. He urged the youngsters to seek out school counselors.”

While Artest, unlike Tebow, is never and will never be touted as a role model, I wonder who is doing more for kids? The guy making Focus on the Family commercials for the Superbowl or the screw-up who talks to kids honestly about being a screw-up?

Then a few days later I learned about B. K. S. Iyengar, a one-man yoga phenomenon who has become a hero to one of my history department colleagues. Yesterday I invoked the evangelical rhetoric of my youth in an effort to throw this colleague off of his racquetball game by asking him if he was using Iyengar to fill his “God shaped hole.” The phrase “God shaped hole” was popularized in the 1990s by the Christian band Plumb. However, my colleague did not know the phrase. He interpreted it as the product of too much abstinence-only education. From there the conversation degenerated into a parsing of the theological and Freudian meanings of having a God-shaped hole. Unfortunately he still kicked my hole on the court.

I am not sure what all of this says about our culture and the different idols we have. But this I do know: God loves the Lakers, hates the current Broncos regime, and is probably pretty impressed by Iyengar. Me too.

The Soul Destroying Poison of the East; or, Why I'll Assume the Savasana Posture while Watching Mad Men

Paul Harvey

I’ve been meaning to get back to doing some yoga, something I did in years past, as a supplement to my normal exercise diet of web-surfing, Netflix-watching, fantasy-football-playing, and martini-glass-lifting. Every time I think of doing so, however, the same chilling thought comes to mind: what will Matt Sutton say? All the trash talk sure to come my way via my gmail from said Sutton should I announce my resumption of yoga as my spiritual discipline and complaining about how I can’t even hold the “Warrior Pose” for more than five seconds, pins me to my chair.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m lazy and would rather just stick to my normal exercise diet, as described above. I report, you decide.

Yoga, and the nexus of yoga with religion, physical fitness, commerce, and sex in America has received much attention lately, probably due to the appearance of a number of recent books detailing the history of the yoga

phenomenon. In this week’s New York Times Book Review (which, startlingly, actually had a number of well-written and engaging reviews which dealt at length and seriously with the subject matter at hand by people who knew something about the subject beforehand -- if only this would be more the norm), Pankaj Mishra reviews Stefanie Syman’s The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, and Robert Love’s The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Barbara Spindel also has a nice review of both works together here. Love focuses more on Pierre Bernard, described by Mishra as “one of the first of many indefatigable charlatans who popularized yoga.” Read the reviews for more fascinating detail on yoga’s Elmer Gantry.

Syman’s work follows a broader track, beginning with the influence of Indian philosophy on the Transcendentalists:

Both Emerson and Thoreau admired the “Bhagavad-Gita”; Emerson’s Oversoul resembles the Brahman, the all-inclusive, all-pervading Self of the Upanishads. However, neither Emerson nor Thoreau knew much about the physical-fitness side of yoga. The earliest Indian vendors of spirituality, like Swami Vivekananda, who lectured on Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, looked down on the asanas, or poses, of hatha yoga as a defective path to yoga’s goal: the union of the individual self with the divine Self.

Syman then follows the appearance of Indian religious figures at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, the struggles of yoga teachers and practitioners through the era of immigration restriction, and finally to the post-1945 recovery of yoga in America and its explosion with the counterculture and intense commercialization afterwards.

The story may appear to be a familiar one: the marketing of yet another religious tradition, and its watering down into a convenient calorie-burner for people on the go. Or at least for people who can tune out and turn off long enough to do so.

That’s certainly part of it, but Mishra points out that religious traditions, no matter how ancient, are always more mixed up than this, and that contemporary Americans were hardly the first to bring together religion, exercise, commerce, and sex:

The image of incorrigibly individualist and materialist Americans rummaging through ancient cultures in search of eternal youth, beauty and self-gratification has long provoked scorn. “Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue,” Carl Jung sternly declared, “is a spiritual fake.” But such a fetish of the “authentic” assumes that people in the country of yoga’s origin have upheld a timeless and unchanging yoga rather than practicing what Wendy Doniger, the distinguished historian of Hinduism, calls the world’s greatest “have your rice cake and eat it” religion.

It was in India that the tradition of Tantrism first exalted the human body as the source of this-worldly liberation. The generation of semi-Westernized Indians who brought about the renaissance of yoga in the early 20th century were themselves syncretists, combining ideas from both East and West. Even the physical aspects that dominate yoga today are partly reimports from the West. T. Krishnamacharya (the South Indian teacher of Indra Devi), B. K. S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois borrowed from gymnastic postures introduced to India by British colonialists.

Reading all this may be just enough to get me back into the bikram studio just down the street (everyone, promise not to tell Sutton). For now, it’s time to assume the savasana (corpse) posture on my lounger, take the first previous sip of an appropriately dry martini, and fire up some Mad Men. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Gilbert's Jeremiad of LeBron the False Prophet, Part II

Todays' guest post comes from Matt Bowman, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University who normally blogs at Juvenile Instructor. Matt follows up on my post from Friday focusing on the theological motifs in Dan Gilbert's open letter to Cleveland Cavaliers fans. Where I saw a theological muddle, Matt sees the tradition of the jeremiad.

LeBron James: false prophet
by Matt Bowman

Paul Harvey already has noted the muddled bricolage of religious invocation that is Cleveland Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert’s screed against his now departed star, LeBron James, who left the city he was raised in and the franchise which drafted him to sign with the Miami Heat. As Paul notes, in one sense Gilbert’s frothing lapses into the sort of lumpy but fascinating theological mess that popular culture often makes of religion; this single sentence:

The self-declared former "King" will be taking the "curse" with him down south. And until he does "right" by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.

manages to make hash of at least three and maybe four distinct religious traditions, invoking the karmic wheel of Indian subcontinent, the traditional vodou religions of Africa, a vague reference to the sort of curses which regularly plague folks in the Bible (and African Americans in the United States), and even, as Paul notes, a faint echo of Biblical commentary about Jesus’s rocky relationship with Nazareth.

But at the same time, people invoke these sorts of motifs for a reason, and I want to sketch out what I see as the larger religious processes (of betrayal/reconciliation, sin/redemption, affliction/purgation, and such) that are worked out on the basketball court in a number of religious ways (my earlier posts exploring the theology of basketball are here and here), and lurk here behind Gilbert’s unfortunate choice of Comic Sans. That is, as unlikely as it may seem, there’s coherence here.

What Gilbert’s really doing in this text is jeremiad, though a complicated one. He is calling Cleveland to repentance, for they have followed after a false prophet, sought after salvation which has turned to ashes and sin in their mouths. But while the jeremiad traditionally invoked the promise of former generations, Gilbert instead appeals to the promise of salvation that once hovered within grasp, and in a series of rhetorical inversions shows how it has been shorn of its finery. While James was once ritually adulated with Nike’s “We Are All Witnesses” campaign, which promulgated ads that did no less than promise LeBron as savior, Gilbert now uses the word to describe the agony of fan watching James’s betrayal. This is, as Gilbert puts it, “bitterly disappointing;” because, of course, “witnessing” is the source of salvation. The word itself invokes evangelical Protestant liturgies of conversion, as sinners are brought to their redemption through hearing the Word of God. In the religion of sports, however, the salvation of identification, of embedding one’s self in the transformative narrative of conflict and triumph, comes through the witnessing of the athletes on the court, of which we are witnesses. Quicken Area was therefore a church, and James’s betrayal of his fans on an ESPN spectacle Gilbert angrily labels “narcissistic” and “self-promotional” has transformed their rite of salvation into an infliction of agony for his own gain, rather than the means of grace which it was intended.

But Gilbert’s jeremiad does not end there; rather, following pattern, after presenting the problem it exhorts to redemption. And Gilbert promises, in best pastoral style, that the path to salvation is not lost; rather, the flock must simply find the correct path. In a rare correct use of apostrophes, Gilbert refers to James as the “chosen one;” a title once used in all seriousness, describing the power James was presumed to have to restore true salvific basketball to Cleveland. Now, however, James has been exposed as a false prophet. And this because, in what Paul rightly notes is one of the most fascinating lines in the document:

Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.

James peddled cheap grace. By somewhat gleeful implication, Gilbert notes that in his seven year career with Cleveland, LeBron failed to win a championship. This, he maintains, was the inevitable result of James’s false religion, but now, liberated by the blinding and painful light of revelation, Cleveland has been rightly converted, and will set about making its own salvation. As Gilbert argues, “this shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own has shifted our "motivation" to previously unknown and previously never experienced levels.”

Ultimately, the purpose of this reverse jeremiad is purgation of sin, an expiation that follows Rene Girard’s analysis of the scape goat of the Hebrew Bible. Gilbert declares, in a rather muddy bit of theological reasoning, that James will bear the “curse” (ie, inability to win, to provide a truly transformative narrative of victory for its fans to find salvation in) with him to Miami, in a way somehow related to his exposure as a false prophet. What this means is that James is the bearer of Cleveland’s sins; he must be ritually cast out from their midst, in order to take with him the contagion that afflicts them. And thus we can understand Gilbert’s insistence that Cleveland is now somehow better off without him. After all, as Gilbert notes, Clevelanders now know that James is the “exact opposite” of “what we would want our children to learn. And ‘who’ we would want them to become.” (sic, on the apostrophes; as I glancingly observed earlier, Gilbert often uses them in baffling fashion.)

It’s therefore perhaps appropriate that Gilbert closes his letter promising that “Tomorrow is a new and much brighter day.” The apostate is cast from the midst; the community’s sins have been eliminated. And the true and only heaven hovers in the distance.

Remember, LeBron, You Got to Go Through Hell Before You Get to Heaven

Paul Harvey

Mike Altman and others here frequently have called for expanding the boundaries of the sacred for analysis, and since various contributors here have posted on everything from Disney Religion to Green Day's American Idiot to early modern tattoos, I should think this would be a receptive venue for an expansive view of religious ritual.

All the same, there's plenty of room here for traditional theological analysis. I"m going to guest post something soon from Jeremy Bangs, about the theological/social worldview of the Pilgrims, which he believes challenges much existing scholarship in the area.

But before we get there, a priceless document for theological analysis has just come to our attention: Dan Gilbert, majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, in an open letter addressed to "All of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland Cavaliers Fans Wherever You May Be Tonight." (He should have just plagiarized from Conan O'Brien's letter to his fans, which was addressed to "People of the Earth").

In case you've been living in a cave this week, let me bring you up to speed: LeBron James has decided to sign with the Miami Heat, joining new teammates Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. Said act was announced in an hour-long show of pretty boring absurdist theater (actually 2 hours, after the post-show coverage) last night on ESPN. Since NPR and the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, et al covered the story as well, I assume that those of you who could give a rat's behind about all this nonetheless could not escape the news story no matter how much you wanted to.

Of more interest to me is owner Gilbert's response (hilariously posted in Comic sans font, as blog reader Matt Bowman pointed out to me), full of sound and (impotent) fury. The letter might as well have been labeled: "LeBron Shouldn't Tap."

Theologically speaking, many important lines of American religious thought crash together (Nascar style) here. Let me count the ways, or at least a few of them:

1) a critique of a culture of narcissism, with a jab at the "narcissistic, self-promotional build-up" to the televised special. Here, of course, we are into Christopher Lasch land, and I'll just point you to this series of posts by our contributor John Fea for more there. Coming from an NBA owner, naturally this is pot calling kettle black stuff, but I'm less interested here in the evident hypocrisy than in the adoption of a pluralistic world of theological motifs.

2) "The self-declared former 'King' will be taking the 'curse' with him down south. And until he does 'right' by Cleveland, James . . . will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma."

Where to begin?? We have Ham's curse together with allusions to some sort of witchery (presumably Pat Riley is the Wizard). We have a common sense view of fairness and justice, and a defensiveness about Cleveland reminiscent of the biblical verse about what good could ever come out of Nazareth. The end reference to karma is likely just cultural cliche, almost completely shorn now of its religious referent (similar to how the term "redemption" is commonly used -- "wow, he really redeemed himself with that putt on the 18th") -- but more charitably, I will assume owner Gilbert has read Stephen Prothero and Thomas Tweed's extensive primary source volume Asian Religions in America, and thus speaks from a profound knowledge of the extensive influence from the nineteenth century forward of Asian religious concepts on the American psyche.

3) Weirdly juxtaposed alongside the abundant Arminian references to assured salvation and the bitterly expressed communal utopianism (guaranteeing that long-suffering Cleveland fans will enjoy the championship hardware before the false prophet LeBron ever does) is a profound aphorism of Hardshell Baptist theology:

"Some people think they should go to heaven but not have to DIE to get there."

I can hear the Appalachian preacher's end-of-line punctuation point -- "ha" -- at the end there, and the capitalization and thus verbal emphasis on DIE comes straight from many a camp meeting sermon a la Kentucky ca. 1805. But more likely, owner Gilbert got this theology via the way everyone else got it in the 1970s, from the Steve Miller Band's "Big Old Jet Airliner," with the line about having to go through hell before you get to heaven. Dante would have been singing along.

Finally, there is the emphasis from Romans 13, about all things working together for good. As Gilbert explains, "This heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called 'curse' on Cleveland, Ohio." Here, the false prophet has been exposed and driven out of town, and the alleged salvation that the prophet would bring can now be seen as just another sacrifice for Baal. The prophet was a conjuror, casting a spell and bringing the curse with the fetish bag of chalk powder (or whatever that white stuff was) thrown up before every game. Those fans who burned the jerseys understood that purification is the communal expiation to rid the last vestiges of the evil and witchery of the false prophet/conjuror. As the slaves sang, "Old Satan is a liar and a conjurer too, If you don't mind, he'll conjure you."

(Needless to say, the burning also calls to mind some of the most disturbing images of American history; for a much more serious analysis of that issue and the whole aspect of the hyperbolic anger directed at a routine business decision, see Tenured Radical's post "A Meditation on the American Way of Rage").

There's much, much more here, theologically speaking, and I invite comments to add to the mix. Until then, goodbye to the people I trusted. LeBron will get rich(er), for sure, but in the meantime he'll get busted.

Don't Mess With the Neo-Macho Christians!

Art Remillard

When I think of “muscular Christianity,” I don’t immediately imagine the “body as temple” theologians, as Clifford Putney has called them. Yes, the Luther Gulicks gave the movement intellectual heft. And yes, it was Gulick who encouraged the Presbyterian minister James Naismith to invent basketball—or as I like to call it, “That Sport Lebron James Plays.” All good stuff, really. But when I think of muscular Christianity, my first image is Billy Sunday.

Theology meant little to the revivalist. Instead, Sunday was more concerned with putting some muscle on to Jesus. “Lord save us,” he prayed, “from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.” In Sunday’s eyes, Jesus “was the greatest scrapper that ever lived.”

Sunday represented a side of muscular Christianity that was thoroughly fretting the so-called “feminization” of Christianity. With each call to fling a “fastball at the devil,” Sunday sought to pull the faithful into his manly zone of influence.

While baseball was a national obsession in Sunday's time, it's a cure for insomnia now. Indeed, for many young men walking in to my classroom, ultimate fighting has become the sport of choice. I don’t watch mixed-martial-arts (MMA), nor do I understand its appeal. But it is popular. And as you might expect, MMA is developing an evangelical edge.

Jason David Frank is a rising star in MMA circles who first gained fame starring in—wait for it—the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Frank, a sixth-degree black, is also co-owner of Jesus Didn’t Tap, a MMA merchandising company. In ultimate fighting, “tapping out” is lingo for forfeiting a fight. “Jesus is the only one that truly didn't tap,” Frank says while describing the company's name. “They say, ‘Oh, he was nailed to the cross so he couldn’t tap.’ Well, you can verbally tap, you can verbally cry, ‘I quit! I give up!’ That's not what he did. He got crucified for all our sins.”

So this incarnation of Billy Sunday might not swing a bat, but he does beat the snot out of people—in the name of Jesus. “When I'm in the cage, I'm full of rage, I'll ground, pound, kick you in the face, but it's all good ‘cause I’m in the right place. The power I get is driven from God, so don’t be mad, it’s just my job.”

Frank isn’t making money from this venture yet, and he might not. But the message seems to Christianize America’s “neo-macho” discourse. Journalist Richard Goldstein coined the term “neo-macho” to describe the sustained rebellion against feminism that only amplified after 9/11. Then, the eloquent Toby Keith united a nation, singing, “Justice will be served/And the battle will rage/This big dog will fight/When you rattle his cage/And you'll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A./‘Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American way.”

Neo-macho man is certainly still with us. He tells us that our pickup truck isn't complete without a RAMBOX to “carry your tools” in. And for the evangelical version, he's amused when a preacher says something about Jesus being a “scrapper.” But he really likes it when that preacher punches someone in the face (instead of turning the other cheek).

America: God's Chosen Country After All?

Paul Harvey

Maybe the Protestant Providentialists have it right after all: after England threw away yet another sure victory (see "Revolution, American") in today's World Cup match, evidence that God created America as an exceptionally blessed nation is clearer than ever. I guess David Barton is right after all. (Update: after the referee took away our victory against Slovenia, one may reasonably infer that God is not all that omnipotent after all).

More seriously (but still fun), I was about to post about religion and the World Cup, when Bradley Onishi, a grad. student at UC Santa Barbara, beat me to it (HT: John Fea). And his piece is a hell of a lot more interesting than what I was going to say, which was basically to repeat a variant of my quadrennial complaint about how basketball is a far superior sport to any other, including soccer, and inspires religious devotion from me, but seemingly from no one else. A taste of Onishi's piece:

If it is not about religion, it seems that the only means of explaining the phenomenon of the World Cup is through categories and concepts that we usually reserve for the religious and the sacred. In a strange way, the World Cup is about none of the forces that overshadow the day-to-day concerns of human life. The Cup is a very elaborate ritual, played out on the largest global scale possible. It transcends politics, economics, and religion by incorporating all of them. It does so by juxtaposing people, groups, national identities, particular belief systems, and political circumstances in manners that simply do not happen in any other setting. In 2006, the small African country of Ghana handed the USA a humbling and hope-crushing defeat. Where and how else in the world does that happen? In the first week of the 2010 Cup alone, Cameroon meets Japan, Argentina confronts Korea, and the freed colonies of the USA revisit mother England. You might tell me that the Olympics do the same thing. True, the Olympics provide a panoply of countries competing against one another in various games. But the World Cup does so in a concentrated setting vis-à-vis the one sport that throughout the world -- from Ghana to Germany to Senegal to Korea to Mexico to Chile to Slovenia -- creates overwhelming obsession, unbridled devotion, and, sadly, violent fanaticism. Starting to sound like religion yet?

By contrast, basketball is the most secular of the major sports that I know, even when there is a deep Protestant versus Catholic (Lakers versus Celtics) contest as there is going on now. I can't think of a sport with less religious ritual than the hardwood game; a little crossing of one' s self on the free throw line, LeBron throwing the chalk in the air, and that's about it, and virtually nothing from the stands -- distinct contrast to baseball (with its endless rituals), and football (with its players kneeling in prayer after crossing the goal line, and the whole ambiance of religion-nationalism surrounding the Super Bowl), and of course soccer, as Onishi explains here. And, for the World Cup, it's not just religion as nationalism, either, because then it would just be the Olympics, as opposed to something different.

My complaints about the superior aesthetic and visceral qualities of basketball aside, I got to see firsthand the religious frenzy induced by the "beautiful game" in Italy in 1982, when Italia won the World Cup semifinals when I was in Florence, and the finals when I was in Rome, whereupon I got to spend an evening riding around in some Italian stranger's VW Bug, shouting "Rossi! Rossi!" (the name of Italy's star striker). Oh what a night. That was a religion I could believe in.

A "Great Match Race" and another Surprising Jewish Athlete

Art Remillard

My summer break begins, and an ambitious reading list awaits. At the top of my pile are two books--interestingly enough--both about endurance. First, John Eisenberg's The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America's First Sports Spectacle.

The Great Match Race is a captivating account of America's first sports spectacle, a horse race that pitted North against South in three grueling heats. On a bright afternoon in May 1823, an unprecedented sixty thousand people showed up to watch two horses run the equivalent of nine Kentucky Derbys in a few hours' time. Eclipse was the majestic champion representing the North, and Henry, an equine arriviste, was the pride of the South. Their match race would come to represent a watershed moment in American history, crystallizing the differences that so fundamentally divided the country. The renowned sportswriter John Eisenberg captures all the pulse-pounding drama and behind-the-scenes tensions in a page-turning mix of history, horse racing, and pure entertainment.

Next up is Alan S. Katchen's Abel Kiviat, National Champion: Twentieth-Century Track & Field and the Melting Pot. Even though I'm a running geek, I'll confess that I had never heard of Kiviat until I saw this title. So I'm very excited to read it, and recommend it to all my running geek friends...

Abel Kiviat (1892-1991) was one of track and field’s legendary personalities, a world record-holder and Olympic medalist in the metric mile. A teenage prodigy, he defeated Hall of Fame runners before his twentieth birthday. Alan S. Katchen brings Kiviat’s fascinating story to life and re-creates a lost world, when track and field was at the height of its popularity and occupying a central place in America’s sporting world. The oldest of seven children of Moishe and Zelda Kiviat, Jewish immigrants from Poland, Abel competed as "the Hebrew runner" for New York’s famed Irish-American Athletic Club and was elected its captain. Katchen’s engaging biography centers Abel Kiviat’s life and his sport firmly in the context of American social history. As a quintessential New Yorker, Kiviat embodies the urban and ethnic roots of American track. From his first schoolboy competitions on city playgrounds, to his world records at Madison Square Garden, to his pioneering role as track’s press steward in the age of emerging media, Kiviat’s life reveals how his sport was shaped by the culture of the emerging metropolis.

Without reading either book, I can only speculate that both emphasize that America's sporting landscape wasn't always dominated by the "holy trinity" of sports: baseball, basketball, and football. Additionally, it seems that they do what good sports histories should do--show how sports shape and are shaped by the powerful social forces of a given time and place.

So it would seem that my summer is off to a great start. We'll see what happens by August.

Watch This! Jonathan Walton's Trek to Harvard Divinity School

by Ed Blum

The West coast will miss Jonathan Walton. In the same week that we cheered the tremendous new resources for the study of religion in the American West, we now boo the fact that Professor Walton will trek from Riverside, California, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he’ll be a new professor at Harvard Divinity School. Just as in the world of sports media, it appears that an east coast bias has once again carried the day. I hope Professor Walton appreciates the nod to sports media, because in those two arenas, Walton has demonstrated his remarkable abilities to bring top notch thinking to multiple publics. Whether addressing scholarly and religious communities with his amazing book Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, whether blogging about current trends in American and African American religion at Religion Dispatches, or whether discussing links between televangelists and professional athletes on ESPN, Walton has become a leading public voice in American religious studies.




The move to Harvard Divinity School comes a year after the publication of Watch This! I’ve been meaning to blog about this book for months (and even started crafting an entry about it and his University of California, Riverside, colleague Jennifer Scheper Hughes’s Biography of a Mexican Cross to highlight the great work coming from UCR), but kept forgetting, or putting it off, or not wanting Professor Walton to have even more great press coverage. It’s hard not to praise this work. It’s an in-depth study of black televangelists – particularly Bishop T. D. Jakes, Bishop Eddie L. Long, and Pastors Creflo Dollar and Taffi Dollar. Walton shows that to understand these televangelists, we need to move beyond a number of interpretive paradigms. First, we cannot fit them into the mold of “progressive” or “otherworldly” black religious history. Not all of African American religious history is progressive, Walton shows. But there is more to these televangelists than an otherworldly framework that forsakes the earth for heaven. Second, we cannot fit these televangelists into previous studies of religious broadcasting and the megachurch movement, because those two phenomena have often been construed as white. By using innovative media technologies to advance not-necessarily-progressive agendas, these religious leaders stand beyond our usual ways of thinking either black religion or religious media.

To analyze the place of Jakes, Long, and the Dollars in both black religious history and new movements in religious media, Walton turns to ethics and aesthetics. He shows, in fact, that the aesthetics of their ministries provide a window into their ethics. Walton showcases the ingenuity of their aesthetics – T. J. Jakes’s sanctuary is a television studio with paintings of clasped praying hands over broken water vessels, Eddie Long’s sanctuary is a theater which regularly has celebrity music ministers, and Creflo Dollar prints “Creflo Dollard, PhD” on the cover of his books to present a sense of authority and expertise beyond the ministry. All of them present themselves and their families as financially successful and overflowing in material abundance. But for all over their media savvy, Walton is deeply troubled by their social and political agendas. He finds that they are committed to hyper-American patriotism, free-market capitalism, and patriarchal conceptions of society’s ordering. By coupling conservative social messages to employ new and modern technologies, these ministers follow the examples of Oral Roberts and Aimee Semple McPherson, two prominent white evangelists and institution builders.

Walton’s study is wonderfully written, engaging, and offers religious historians new approaches to media studies, ethics, and African American religiosity. My graduate seminar had a robust conversation about each televangelist, and we contemplated new ways to study these ministers – whether from Youtube presentations to images on their websites.

To honor Professor Walton’s new venture to Cambridge, though, I wanted to pose some points that perhaps could have come at the famous “sherry hour” portion of Harvard Divinity School interviews (where candidates drink sherry after their job talks and try to answer sophisticated questions that they may or may not understand while getting slightly intoxicated). Is it possible that Professor Walton’s ethical critique of these televangelists is far more rooted in the material world than their preaching? At the end of Walton’s book, he chastises their presentation of material prosperity because it does not fit with the actual social and economic experiences of everyday African Americans. Ethics of consumption are not ethical for African American communities, Walton seems to suggest. He relies upon the sociological work of Thomas Shapiro and William Julius Wilson to show that black Americans are not accumulating wealth at the rate of white Americans – and wealth, not income, should be the measure of growth. Yet is this an appropriate ethical measure? Is it possible that psychological or emotional or even spiritual capital is being accumulated through these economic teachings and presentations? Is it possible that another form of ethical judgment – one not rooted in material gain itself but in other measures – would give us a better explanation for why so many thousands follow these preachers?

And this speaks to another problem with Walton’s Watch This. It is fundamentally a book evaluating these televangelists. It is not a book about why everyday people – men and women all over the country and world – find their teachings compelling, so compelling that they buy their books, watch their television shows, attend their conferences, and get glad when they succeed. For more on the everyday viewer, one would need to turn to Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell’s fantastic Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. If Walton had spent more time with everyday viewers and consumers, he may have found different resources than financial ones being accumulated through the material aesthetics of these televangelists.

If you know Professor Walton, then you would know these are the kinds of debates he tackles and loves. He’s the kind of professor who wants to struggle with the highest of intellectual thought and the depth of everyday culture. He endeavors to be a public intellectual whose ideas can be intelligible to those who walk within the ivory tower, kneel within their sanctuaries, and stomp along the gridiron (if you can’t tell, I’m already pining for football season!) Professor Walton, enjoy the East coast. The West will certainly miss your presence, but will continue to read your blog entries, watch your television interviews, and wait for that next great book.

Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Part III a: Lacrosse, the Jesuit Relations, and a Man of "Sense"

Art Remillard

Just south of Syracuse, New York, members of the Onondaga Nation regularly gather in a ritualized celebration of community, tradition, and family. It’s a rather sweaty affair—but then again, games of lacrosse generally are. “Families here have been playing lacrosse together for a long time. It is part of our lives,” says Chief Irving Powless. Unlike the game you might be familiar with, the Onondaga version of lacrosse is quite unique. Their field has neither boundaries nor standard lengths. The number of participants vary from game to game. Clans make up the teams, so a game might have 5 against 30, depending on who shows up. And people of all ages play, from 10 to 80 (as far as I can tell, Powless is in his late 70s and still plays). None of this has made the game any less intense. Rumor has it that when Jim Brown came to the reservation to play, a 145-pound Powless knocked him to the ground. It’s no wonder why the Cherokee nicknamed lacrosse “the little brother of war.”

But the vigorous play is not for show. Instead, it fuses with effort and joy, and expresses a living connection with the past and present. As Powless explains, “When we play a game here on Mother Earth, a game is taking place up there in the Land of the Creator at the same time. . . . So then after we pass away and we are through we have a means by which we can get our stick up into the Creator's world so that we'll play again.”

This brings me to Paul’s post on the Jesuit Relations. The Relations holds our first written description of lacrosse, which certainly did not emphasize the community-binding function of the game. Instead, we see a prime example of the spiritual competition at work between French missionaries and medicine men--or more broadly, between European Catholicism and Native American traditions.
In 1636, living among the Huron in Ontario, Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf commented on the game that he would call “lacrosse”—named such because the sticks reminded him of the “crosier” carried by bishops in religious processions. The connection between Catholicism and Indian culture ended there. Brébeuf had no love for the “sorcerer” who prescribed lacrosse as cure for individual and communal illness.

In the classroom, I use Brébeuf’s description of lacrosse to illustrate James Axtell's point that French missionaries labored to become “a man of ‘sense.’” That is, Black Robes went to great lengths learning, documenting, and absorbing Indian culture, language, customs, and religion. The end goal (bad pun?) was to build status within the tribe, and challenge the "shamanic rival for spiritual leadership.”

Below is Brébeuf’s description of Indian lacrosse. He also talks about a game of chance called "dish." You can find this writing in both Allen Greer’s aforementioned The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America and online.

-----------------
Of three kinds of games especially in use among these Peoples,—namely, the games of lacrosse, dish, and straw,—the first two are, they say, most healing. Is not this worthy of compassion? There is a poor sick man, fevered of body and almost dying, and a miserable Sorcerer will order for him, as a cooling remedy, a game of lacrosse. Or the sick man himself, sometimes, will have dreamed that he must die unless the whole country shall play lacrosse for his health; and, no matter how little may be his credit, you will see then in a beautiful field, Village contending against Village, as to who will play lacrosse the better, and betting against one another Beaver robes and Porcelain collars, so as to excite greater interest.

Sometimes, also, one of these jugglers will say that the whole Country is sick, and he asks a game of lacrosse to heal it; no more needs to be said, it is published immediately everywhere; and all the Captains of each Village give orders that all the young men do their duty in this respect, otherwise some great misfortune would befall the whole Country.

The game of dish is also in great renown in affairs of medicine, especially if the sick man has dreamed of it. This game is purely one of chance: they play it with six plum-stones, white on one side and black on the other, in a dish that they strike very roughly against the ground, so that the plum-stones leap up and fall, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. The game consists in throwing all white or all black; they usually play Village against Village. All the people gather in a Cabin, and they dispose themselves on poles, arranged as high as the roof, along both sides. The sick man is brought in in a blanket, and that man of the Village who is to shake the dish (for there is only one on each side set apart for the purpose), he, I say, walks behind, his head and face wrapped in his garment. They bet heavily on both sides. When the man of the opposite party takes the dish they cry at the top of their voice achinc, achinc, achinc, " three, three, three," or perhaps ioio, ioio, ioio, wishing him to throw only three white or three black. You might have seen this winter a great crowd returning from here to their Villages, having lost their moccasins at a time when there was nearly three feet of snow,—apparently as cheerful, nevertheless, as if they had won. The most remarkable thing I notice in regard to this matter is the disposition they bring to it. There are some who fast several days before playing: the evening before, they all meet together in a Cabin, and make a feast to find out what will be the result of the game. The one chosen to hold the dish takes the stones, and puts them promiscuously into a dish, and covers it, so as to prevent any one from putting his hand into it. That done, they sing; the song over, the dish is uncovered, and the plum-stones are found all white or all black. On this point, I asked a Savage if those against whom they were to play did not do the same on their side, and if they might not find the plum-stones in the same condition. He said they did; "And yet, " said I to him," all can not win;" to that he knew not what to answer. He informed me besides of two remarkable things: in the first place, that they choose, to handle the dish, some one who had dreamed that he would win, or who had a charm; moreover, those who have a charm do not conceal it, and carry it everywhere with them: we have, they tell me, one of these in our Village, who rubs the plum-stones with a certain ointment and hardly ever fails to win. Secondly, that in making the attempt some of the plum-stones disappear, and are found some time after in the dish with the others.

Among all these fooleries, I dare not speak of the infamies and uncleanness which the Devil makes to slip into them, causing them to see in a dream that they can only be healed by wallowing in all sorts of filth. May he who has saved us by the blood of the Lamb grant to remedy this as soon as possible, accepting for this purpose, if need be, our souls and lives, that we most willingly offer to him for the salvation of these Peoples, and the remission of our own sins.

Nick Saban 1, God 0

Paul Harvey

Nick Saban (coach of the championship Alabama Crimson Tide football team) has more Facebook fans than does God in the great state of Alabama. So the Birmingham News reports.

What does this betoken for southern religious history? Might Drew Brees soon be outdrawing the Virgin on facebook accounts in Louisiana?

In Florida, Starbucks wins, but we always knew they weren't really in the South anyway.

Oklahoma is not represented here -- my home state slighted yet again. Texas also isn't reported, which is perfectly ok with me.

Deg -- Georgia is a question mark here. How does Chick-Fil-A measure up to God in the Facebook polls?

Hat tip to Seth Dowland for this in-depth research.

More Surprises

Art Remillard

Sports have sometimes given religious minorities a venue for both displaying their faith and diminishing the majority's suspicions. Consider pugilist Benny Leonard, who from 1917 to 1925 held the lightweight championship. The New Yorker was more than just an athlete. Writing in 1980, novelist Budd Schulberg recalled watching the boxer in his prime, climbing into the ring with the Star of David on his trunks, giving Jews hopes of “sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys." Over time, the "mocking laughter" quieted. Journalist Arthur Brisbane speculated that Leonard did “more to conquer anti-Semitism than a thousand textbooks.” Leonard was not the only Jewish boxer battling both opponents and bigotry. From 1901 to 1938, there were 27 Jewish world champions.

Jews also muscled into the mainstream on the baseball diamond. During the 1930s and 1940s, “Hammerin’” Hank Greenberg amassed 331 home runs and 1276 RBIs, while maintaining a .313 lifetime batting average. Greenberg played his best years in Detroit, where folks like Father Charles Coughlin and Henry Ford didn't make life easy for Jews. Yet, Greenburg’s face appeared on the cover of the Wheaties box, an “all-American” cereal if there ever was one.

As for Jewish basketball players, see David Vyorst's new documentary, First Basket. He explains in a recent NPR interview:

[At] the turn of the 20th century, most of the Jewish people who came into the country moved into the lowery side of Manhattan. So people lived within ethnic communities, largely. And many of the teams grew out of those communities. Whereas sports is a way where you want to fit in with the culture writ large, basketball - the way that these kids played basketball, they were able to play basketball, kind of become American, but on their own terms.

Here's the trailer: