Muscular Christianity

Dissatisfied with a Victorian culture focused on domesticity and threatened by physical decline in sedentary office jobs, American men in the late nineteenth century sought masculine company in fraternal lodges and engaged in exercise to invigorate their bodies. One form of this new manly culture, developed out of the Protestant churches, was known as muscular Christianity. In this fascinating study, Clifford Putney details how Protestant leaders promoted competitive sports and physical education to create an ideal of Christian manliness.

The definitive guide to the increasingly popular field of sports ministry.

Written by leading scholars from around the world, the articles in this volume range from sin, Sufism and terrorism to theology in the 19th and 20th centuries, Vatican I and II and the virgin birth.

This Volume explores the enormous impact the ethos of Muscular Christianity has had an on modern civil society in English-speaking nations and among the peoples they colonized. First codified by British Christian Socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, explicitly religious forms of the ideology have persistently re-emerged over ensuing decades: secularized, essentialized, and normalized versions of the ethos - the public school spirit, the games ethic, moral masculinity, the strenuous life - came to dominate and to spread rapidly across class, status, and gender lines. These developments have been appropriated by the state to support imperial military and colonial projects. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century apologists and critics alike widely understood Muscular Christianity to be a key engine of British colonialism. This text demonstrates the need to re-evaluate the entire history of Muscular Christianity comes chiefly from contemporary post-colonial studies. The papers explore fascinating case materials from Canada, the U.S., India, Japan, Papua, New Guinea, the Spanish Caribbean, and in Britain in a joint effort to outline a truly international, post-colonial sport history. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Born and raised in Norfolk and educated at Oxford, George Raikes (1873-1966) was an all-round sportsman, gaining four ‘blues’ for soccer and two for cricket in the 1890s as well as being effective on the golf course and the tennis court. As a goalkeeper his reviews were almost all ‘rave’ and it was no surprise when he earned four caps for England – what was a surprise was that he retired abruptly at the age of 23 to enter the Church. However, his religious duties did not entirely prevent him from playing cricket and he re-appeared for Norfolk in 1904, re-invented as an inspirational and astute skipper, leading Norfolk to two Minor Counties Championships in his four years as captain; and, intriguingly, as one of the first ‘modern’ leg spinners – developing and retaining control over a variety of deliveries that bamboozled Minor Counties batsmen across the country. This book aims to place Raikes’ sporting deeds in the context of the rise of professionalism in soccer, the inter-play between religion and sport at the end of the 19th century and the development of wrist spin. Alas, it does not claim to understand the theory behind his occasional use of the ‘slow beamer’ as a stock delivery...

Muscular Christianity was an important religious, literary, and social movement of the mid-nineteenth century. This volume draws on recent developments in cultural and gender theory to reveal close links between the ideology of the movement and the work of novelists and essayists, including Kingsley, Emerson, Dickens and Pater. Throughout this book, which also contributes to the critical debate on the body as a site for socio-political conflict, Muscular Christianity is shown to be at the heart of issues of gender, class, and national identity in the Victorian age.

Handbook for Religion and Social Institutions is written for sociologists who study a variety of sub-disciplines and are interested in recent studies and theoretical approaches that relate religious variables to their particular area of interest. The handbook focuses on several major themes: - Social Institutions such as Politics, Economics, Education, Health and Social Welfare - Family and the Life Cycle - Inequality - Social Control - Culture - Religion as a Social Institution and in a Global Perspective This handbook will be of interest to social scientists including sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and other researchers whose study brings them in contact with the study of religion and its impact on social institutions.

This book is a study of the motivations that drive increasing numbers of people into the contemporary institution of the gymnasium that promises its prospective members the opportunity of positive physical transformation through membership.