Buddha On The Backstretch

Using Buddhism as a lens to examine NASCAR racing - and NASCAR as a means to illustrate Buddhist teachings, this title provides a fresh perspective on the field of sports and spirituality. It considers mindfulness, handling setbacks, patience, discipline, heightened awareness, impermanence, equanimity, and how we face death.

Analyzes the interchanges between world religions, religious practice, spirituality, and global sport. This journal uses diverse methodological approaches to religion and sport from a variety of disciplines such as myth and ritual studies, historical studies, popular culture studies, and liturgical studies.

Buddhism in the United States is often viewed in connection with practitioners in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but in fact, it has been spreading and evolving throughout the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. In Dixie Dharma, J

The Holy Trinity of American Sports explores how football, baseball, and basketball interact to illustrate civil religion in the United States. These three sports mark movement through one year in the country, providing extended seasons to supplement holidays like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Year after year, they generate ritual actions of daily, weekly, yearly, and once-in-a-lifetime significance. Football, baseball, and basketball portray three core stories of national worldview. Football depicts stories about the realities of life within history, while baseball expresses mythic aspiration for an ideal future. Basketball presents narrative of irreversible progress, story of fast-paced movement to highly productive conditions. Through stories of life, the three games convey doctrines about the source of truth, where to find knowledge of truths, and how to solve problems. Beyond doctrinal convictions, they disclose ethical beliefs of the nation for the worst, best, and most common situations. Functioning as a unit, the sports trinity communicates commitments to certain social arrangements, offering directives for interaction with people outside and inside the country. Football, baseball, and basketball possess great importance in the United States because they provide comprehensive and detailed illustration of American beliefs.

Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.' Lao-Tzu (poet and philosopher) In this collection of short, contemplative, enlightening reflections, spiritual teacher and Quaker Christopher Goodchild, inspired by his own experiences, guides you through his spiritual and philosophical journey to his truest and most peaceful self. Written from a 'soul' perspective, the book reveals how, by looking beyond vulnerability to see innate strength, and searching beyond pain and turmoil to find peace and serenity, anyone can affirm their true humanity despite the hardships and distractions of modern life. Christopher's compassionate route through difficulties, doubt, grief and fear is marked with dynamic tenderness and an artful embrace of abundant sources of wisdom. Spirituality, psychology and philosophy are seamlessly woven together in an inclusive Quaker context, led by the common values of love and forgiveness. In a world increasingly weighed down with the baggage of the self, this book will speak to anyone searching for a more clear-sighted, meaningful presence in the eternal universe.

Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South takes seriously the often-stated assertion that college football in the South is a religion. To this end, Eric Bain-Selbo draws upon a wide range of theoretical approaches in religious studies and cultural criticism. He also relies upon field research on several campuses in the Southeastern Conference where he interviewed fans and experienced "game day." Consequently, the author is able to make the case that college football does function religiously for many people in the South. In addition, the author introduces key concepts and theories of religion and culture to a general audience Game Day and God also recounts the role that college football has played in Southern history and culture. Going back as far as the Civil War, the work explains the cultural meaning of college football in the South, delivering a much-needed critical perspective to the subject Scholars of religion will find the work a compelling extension of key concepts and theories to an otherwise "secular" activity. Scholars of American culture and sports will find the work to be an interesting case study, one that-unlike much work in the area-focuses our attention on the religious dimension of the phenomenon of sport in American culture. And general readers will find that college football or any sport can be much more than they imagined as well as discover important theories with which to make sense of the complexity of our daily lives Book jacket.

Those who have lived – not just witnessed - the efflorescence of a pivotal culture moment never see the world through veiled eyes again. Jimmy Lyons was there, devising wholly original inventions of words and music while the Beats, the neo-folk troubadours, the post-bop jazz shooting stars, and the tie-dyed psychedelic rockers were scorching through the underbrush and opening new paths of creativity as alternatives to the increasingly bottom line-driven mainstream. Lyons, though, wasn’t content to find a niche in one countercultural movement or another. He kept moving, observing, and writing new poems, stories, and songs. But he never gave up on the wry sophistication of the classic American popular song. Indeed, he has dedicated himself to infusing the same hallowed forms perfected by Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and others, with his singular fantasias of ingeniously colored and textured wordplay. These plays have a subtext only Lyons can provide, derived from what he calls the “rituals of the road” and the “the circular rhythms” of the race track, the beats and pulses of everyday American life that rarely raise a ripple on the surface of American culture. Lyons hears the screams and dreams of his countrymen and woman; from them he creates new modes of expression. He has been changed by each of his open-hearted an open-eared encounters, and this body of work is his way of making those changes sing and swing. – Derk Richardson

A rollercoaster ride with NYPD Detective Jack Yu, illuminating the underground world of Chinatown gambling, smuggling, and protection Jack Yu is one of the few ethnically Chinese officers in the NYPD. Now Jack has been promoted out of the Chinatown Precinct. With multiple murders occurring within days of his transfer, the Ninth Precinct isn’t less violent, per se, but at least Jack doesn’t know most of the perps. When a bloody shootout goes down in Chinatown though, the upper echelons of the NYPD reach out to him for help squelching the escalating gang violence, and Jack learns he cannot get away from Chinatown’s criminals—his old friends—for long.