James Schall opens his essay “On the Seriousness of Sports” with a few passages from ancient literature that discuss the topic. “If we look in classical literature,” he says, “we will find, perhaps unexpectedly, several passages that show a knowledge of or reference to sports. . . . Such reflections from such sources ought to cause us to wonder a bit about sports.” Schall pulls from Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Politics, and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (to which we could add Pindar’s Olympian Odes) both to demonstrate that we have, from the beginning, loved sport as a good for its own sake and to suggest that it is integral to the human experience. Schall wants to convince us that sports are, as the title suggests, serious. How serious? He argues that “the closest the average man ever gets to contemplation . . . is watching a good, significant sporting event.”
So, quite serious.
Read Full Article »