Prebish offers a thoughtful look at sport as a religious experience and argues that sport has become an American religion. The first section of the work contains three chapters that provide a definitional, theoretical, and methodological frame for examining sport as religion. The five chapters that follow, each written by an authority in the field, treat different aspects of the religious dimension of sport. These chapters represent the most important writings on sport as a religious experience, and each author offers a full and thoughtful discussion rather than a cursory overview. A final chapter by Prebish closes the work.
The first chapter of the book challenges traditional assumptions about religion and encourages the reader to reconsider what religion is. The second chapter examines the difficulty of defining sport, and the third probes the close relationship between sport and religion. The anthology that follows contains chapters that examine religion and sport from sociological, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. A concluding bibliography lists material for further reading.
About the Author: CHARLES S. PREBISH is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. An authority on Oriental religions, he has authored or edited six books on Buddhism. His many articles have appeared in journals such as Religious Studies Review, Journal of Asian Studies, History of Religions, and Journal of the American Oriental Society. He has also contributed material to the Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions (1981), The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), and the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience (1988).
