Religion and Sports in American Culture explores the relationship between religion and modern sports in America. Whether found in the religious purpose of ancient Olympic Games, in curses believed to plague the Chicago Cubs, or in the figure of Tim Tebow, religion and sports have been and are still tightly intertwined. While there is widespread suspicion that sports are slowly encroaching on the territory historically occupied by religion, Scholes and Sassower assert that sports are not replacing religion and that neither is sports a religion. Instead, the authors look at the relationship between sports and religion in America from a post-secular perspective that looks at both discourses as a part of the same cultural web. In this way each institution is able to maintain its own integrity, legitimacy, and unique expression of cultural values as they relate to each other. Utilizing important themes that intersect both religion and sports, Scholes and Sassower illuminate the complex and often publicly contentious relationship between the two.  Appropriate for both classroom use and for the interested non-specialist, Religion and Sports in American Culture brings pilgrimage, sacrifice, relics, and redemption together in an unexpected cultural continuity.

Religion and Sports in American Culture

Politics & Social Sciences

Sassower, Raphael

Scholes, Jeffrey

Sociology

Routledge

Cultural Collisions

In Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science.

Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience

Philosophy

In Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science.

Confronting Disaster: An Existential Approach to Technoscience

Contemporary society is rife with instability. Human's active and invasive invesitgation of genetics has raised and given life to the one-time science fiction specter, the clone. The scarcity of natural energy sources had led to greater manipulation of atomic or nuclear energy and as a result greater danger. And the promises of globalization have, in some cases, delivered but in many other ways they have created greater social and economic gaps. Raphael Sassower addresses growing popular anxiety around these and other issues inConfronting Disaster: An Existential Approach to Techoscience.

Social Sciences

Lexington Books

Popper's Legacy: Rethinking Politics, Economics, and Science

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

McGill-Queen's University Press

Karl Popper has had an extraordinary influence on scientific and social thought. Widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century, he was also a highly influential social and political philosopher, a proponent and defender of the open society. Popper's Legacy examines all aspects of his work, in particular his moral and psychological insights. Once Popper's scientific legacy is couched in political and moral terms, it becomes apparent that his concern for individual autonomy does not come at the expense of institutional guidelines and social conventions. Instead, these guidelines turn out to be essential sanctions for individual freedom. Popper envisions the conduct of the scientific community as paralleling the conduct of any democratically established community, where critical rationality guides the words and actions of all participants and leadership can be changed without violence. Raphael Sassower reveals the debt many intellectual movements - such as feminism, and postmodernism - owe to Popper.

Challenging the conventional medical ethics model of rights language.

Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine

Cutter, Mary Ann

Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine: Integrative Bioethics

Challenging the conventional medical ethics model of rights language.

The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

Arts & Photography

Cicotello, Louis

History & Criticism

University of Virginia Press

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.
Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.
While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sassower, Raphael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sassower, Raphael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sassower, Raphael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Religion and Sports in American Culture

Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience

Cultural Collisions

Confronting Disaster: An Existential Approach to Technoscience

Popper's Legacy: Rethinking Politics, Economics, and Science

Popper's Legacy: Rethinking Politics, Economics, and Science

Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine

Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine

The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)

The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)