This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
Blessed are the games
Sport becomes a secular creed. Hunger Games prequel. New high priests
Singing hosannas? Image: Badreddine Gheribi/ Unsplash
The Big Story:
The sports calendar hits a high point this week — from T20 cricket in Asia, to Six Nations rugby and the Winter Olympics in Europe and the Super Bowl in the US.
Sport delivers a form of transcendence to devotees, as well as rituals, a sense of community…and sometimes, fanatical belief.
Has sport become the new religion?
One of our book picks, Religion of Sports, is adamant:
…no faith is more active than the Religion of Sports, which packages all this wisdom in a way that anybody can understand it: wins, losses, championships, heroes, and underdogs…Sports is the religion where our gods are flawed humans like the rest of us… It’s a faith that creates miracles all the time.”
This Week’s Books:
- A scholarly view of how sport changed from a sacred ritual.
- The newest Hunger Games novel takes us back to the gruesome arena.
- A true believer speaks up.
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Originally published at https://medium.com
Originally published at https://medium.com
