Editorial

The 2011 annual conference of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics was given over to the question of ‘Christian Ethics and Sport’. The theme had especial relevance in view of the forthcoming Olympic Games to be held in London in the summer of 2012, and allowed for a kind of preparation for the impact this huge and costly international event no doubt will have on a city and a nation. The concluding panel discussion considered some of these implications explicitly, under the title, ‘Making the Games Good News: Local Churches organising for an ethical Olympics’. Our thanks are due to the convenor, Dr Luke Bretherton, to Rev’d Dr Angus Ritchie, Director of the Contextual Theology Centre in London, and to Emmanuel Gotora, TELCO Borough Community Organiser for Newham and Redbridge (London Citizens), for their guidance in grasping the wider social and political context in which the church is called to give witness of the justice, peace and charity of God. A further opportunity to reflect on the connections between politics, religion and sport was provided by Professor Jolyon Mitchell in an illustrated presentation of ‘Sport on Screen: Faith in Chariots of Fire and Beyond’, given after the conference dinner. These additional elements enhanced the conference deliberations, bringing out in new ways the matters raised by the main speakers in the papers that are published here.

Interesting perhaps was the fact that comparatively little attention was given at the conference to the more obvious ethical issues arising in the practice of sports today. These are the subject of much media comment and public dismay about a range of ‘scandals’ from game fixing, cheating or deception, and tolerance of violence to the inflated salaries of professional athletes, the prevalence of a celebrity culture, and the misuse or abuse of performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, the conference speakers concentrated their reflections on the nature of sport itself, on how it may both illuminate the life of faith and in its own ways exemplify some of the finer elements of religious experience. Here it is the liminal character of sport that is given more prominence, the quality that drives an individual athlete to the edges of physical and mental endurance, and that provides occasions for people to exceed the boundaries of their everyday lives in forgetfulness at play.

There is something of theological and moral significance that may be seen in sport insofar as it stretches out to the limit of the possible and strives for consistent excellence at exactly the place where records are broken and previous achievements ever exceeded. Such an understanding of sport as a kind of quest for transcendence then may indicate in a preliminary way the quality of moral reasoning that uniquely seeks for what is not yet here, and so too the character of faith as reception of a truth from beyond ourselves most closely enacted in liturgy. Yet the theologian resists its own task being subsumed in sport per se, and as one who already is given to speak from what lies beyond human grasping, sits more lightly to the historical manifestations of sport. This may explain a certain tension that comes to light in these papers, of sport on the one hand as a positive contribution to the moral formation of individuals in the virtues and to the cultural identity and values of a people, and on the other as a politically and economically conditioned activity directed to transient ideals and subject to passing fads. The various critiques of ‘muscular Christianity’ undertaken by a number of the speakers are exercises in the delicacy of finding faithful theological voice in this dialogue.

Many thanks then to the main speakers and to those who presented short papers at the conference, a few of which are published here. It may be that these reflections will provoke responses more thoughtful and appropriate to the times than the typical and rather shallow ‘optimism’ or ‘pessimism’.