Feeling God’s Presence in Sports

According to Mr. Carney, the genesis for the trio’s research on the intersection between sports and theology certainly came out of their passion for sports, but also because of a noticeable gap in scholarship on this relationship. “There’s a lot of good stuff on sports, but what we hadn’t seen in our teaching and in our research was an accessible yet thoughtful, erudite and systematic theology of sport,” Mr. Carney said. Of course, the church’s relationship with sports extends much further back than Francis’ pontificate. Mr. Hoven points out that sports played a significant role in the pontificate of John Paul II. He was dubbed “the sportsman’s pope” and once wrote that sports is “not an end in itself but as a means to total and harmonious physical, moral and social development.”