The Sport and Religion Connection: A Conversation Between Scholars

Sport and religion continue to be vital components of American culture. Fandom and devotion drive many people to invest their time, energy, and resources to their favorite sports team or religious community. Many people, however, never consider how sport and religion might overlap or intersect. This conversation brings together two leading scholars who trace the lines between sports and religion in the United States in their latest books.

Bio: Randall Balmer is an Episcopal priest, a prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth College. He is the author of more than a dozen books, and his commentaries appear in newspapers across the country. In 2016, he was elected as honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, and in 2024, the American Academy of Religion gave him the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Bio: Terry Shoemaker is a qualitative research scholar focusing on religious change in contemporary life in the United States. This includes the ways that religion and religious people adapt, convert, deconvert, reform, and abandon aspects of their religiosity or spirituality. He is interested also in studying sports in the United States through the lens of religious studies theories and methods. His work is featured at numerous sites like The Conversation, Zócalo Public Square, and Religion Dispatches.  These interests lead Terry into various classes at ASU on the topics of Religion and Popular Culture, Religion and Sports, and Spirituality in America.

His latest book Religions and Sports: The Basics provides an introductory text for how to understand the many relationships between religion and sports, and how to study the two phenomena. Religions and Sports follows previously published work like The Prophetic Dimension of Sport (2018) and a second edited volume regarding the future of progressive Christianity and the Millennial generation with Wifp & Stock Publishers. Terry currently serves as vice president of the Society for the Future of Higher Education (SFHE), as the co-editor of the International Journal of Sport and Religion, and on the Religion, Sport, and Play American Academy of Religion steering committee.

This hybrid event is hosted by Sports @ HI Initiative at Humanities Institute. For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/events

• For in-person attendees, light refreshments will be provided.

• For online attendees, join via Zoom.