Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Michener is the evangelist of sports−Jock Lit's Billy Graham−Novak is the theologian. "Sports is. somehow, a religion," Novak declares, and happily settles down to his priestly duties. Words like "ritual," "legend" and "myth" labor in overtime. "Grace" takes on a double meaning. Old George Blanda is compared to Ulysses as he copes on "the green oval floor of the amphitheater" otherwise known as a football field. The "unforgettable stance and fluid swing" of Joe DiMaggio cannot be celebrated without cosmic theorizing. "Baseball is as close a liturgical enactment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...
...name of a used-car dealer. Jock Lit authors are so deadly serious they kill the fun. Yet they are not serious enough. To suggest, as Novak does, that sports may lie at the heart of America's spiritual regeneration is to overrate sports−or underrate religion−or both...
...only are the Southern Baptists, now 12.7 million in all 50 states, growing by some 250,000 a year, but the total of evangelical Americans is estimated at between 40 and 50 million*. But among skeptics, there remain lingering doubts about the political significance of Carter's religion and of the Southern Baptists themselves. Are they, as some fear, secretly prejudiced against blacks, Catholics, Jews, and indeed anyone unlike themselves? Are they likely to become an oppressive influence in a Carter Administration? Who exactly are the Southern Baptists and what do they stand...
...astonishment." The first Baptist church in America was founded in Providence in 1639 by Roger Williams, who had been recently expelled from Massachusetts for his "new and dangerous opinions." But Williams himself decided that same year that no single church, not even his own, could express the true religion...
...Baptists point to a long tradition of fighting for separation of church and state. Indeed it was their fear of a Roman Catholic President that led a group of Southern Baptist ministers to join in interrogating John F. Kennedy about his religious views in 1960, the last time that religion played a major role in U.S. presidential politics. Even today, says Foy Valentine, executive secretary of the Baptists' Christian Life Commission, "Roman Catholics who want tax money for their parochial schools and so forth will catch it from the Southern Baptists." But Carter says: "I've never tried...