Spirit and Sport: Religion and the Fragile Athletic Body in Popular Culture by Sean Samuel O’Neil

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spirit and Sport: Religion and the Fragile Athletic Body in Popular Culture by Sean Samuel O’Neil Dr. Nick J. Watson Sean Samuel O’Neil, Spirit and Sport: Religion and the Fragile Athletic Body in Popular Culture (Sport and Popular Culture Series, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville), 2022. During the last two decades there has been a marked increase in publications, events and practical initiatives surrounding sports and the Christian faith. Within this corpus of work there has been limited explorations of the theology of disability sport, in particular, scholarship that specifically addresses bodily fragility and vulnerability. Therefore, Sean O’Neil’s book is a welcome and timely contribution to the literature, especially because of its rich and provocative content rooted in popular culture, which makes it ideal for classroom discussion and study—the author himself teaches a sport and religion class from which some of the book’s content emerged. This book’s content is provocative (in a good way). The book comprises six thematic chapters, a conclusion and afterword. Chapter titles such as, Eunuchs and Suicidal Athletes: Co-Creating Meaning in Times of Despair (Ch. 2), Pilgrimage, Prozac, and Pentecostals: Synchronicity on God’s Path (Ch. 3) and Cowboys and Soul Surfers: Gender, Disability, and Nature from Bethany Hamilton to The Rider (Ch. 6), reflect the provocative, challenging and engaging content of the text. An auto-ethno-graphic approach is adopted by the author—a hospital chaplain, bishop and pastor—who carefully weaves parts of his own life story into the book’s narrative. One methodological reason to deploy an auto-ethno-graphic approach in scholarly writing or empirical research, is that the author/researcher has an in-depth and experiential understanding of some, or all, of the subject matter. The following excerpt from the Preface, which was written by the author, demonstrates how the use of autoethnography organically emerged during the book project: When I began this project, I did not plan to use personal details. I did not anticipate that body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a personal antagonist that I thought had weakened over the years would revive [End Page 67] with such overwhelming force in my life. My mental health struggles became so acute when I worked as a hospital chaplain during the pandemic that I wondered tearfully at times whether my wife would ultimately end up completing this book in my post-humous absence. . . . Something happened, though, even before that grueling emotional stretch, that made me determined to include aspects of my personal life in this book. As is the case for so many of the meaningful events I describe in this book, the turning point was the result of a coincidence [at] a Christian writer’s conference. (p. xiii) Vulnerability, coincidence (some would say God-incidence), God’s providence and what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called synchronicity, are frequent themes in the book, both in the description of the author’s life and of those athletes whose stories of bodily vulnerability and fragility are included within the narrative—Bethany Hamilton, Oscar Pistorius and Steve Gleason, for instance. Other strong themes in the book are the secular-sacred dyad, depression and anxiety, race, pilgrimage, brain trauma from participation in violent sports, intersectionality, platform ministry-evangelism, embodiment, human limitations and the American dream (and the myth of individual opportunity), the Great Sports Myth (the widespread belief that sports are always intrinsically good) and the use of fictional accounts of the sport-religion relationship, for example, A Prayer for Owen Meaney. And so, this book is truly interdisciplinary, broad in its scope and in some ways polemic in that it provides a critique of the dominant big-business American sports model and ableist attitudes in wider US culture. Given the diversity of themes presented in the book it is challenging to know which to highlight and discuss in a brief review essay, so to best represent the book’s overall content and merits (and limitations). Arguably, chapter four—The Perils of Black Athletic Success: What ‘Get Out’ Gets Right about Inspiration Porn—is an important one, if one measures importance by the number of people across America that its content may impinge upon. The...