ABSTRACT

It will, perhaps, be intellectually rewarding to begin this paper with two anecdotes whose derivation is from local lore that circulates in the popular imagination. The fi rst is a narrative told of an English boy who was asked if he knew or, at least, had heard about Jesus Christ. After a raging moment of introspection, the boy blurted out in an apparent answer to the question with two questions: what club does he play for? Is it Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, or Manchester United? The youthful imagination of this English lad, it will seem, is largely structured, saturated, and governed by football, not religion. Indeed, in radical contradistinction, religion and spirituality embodied in Jesus Christ at best enjoy a peripheral space in his consciousness. The ontological power and popularity of the sport over the person of Jesus becomes an ideological foreground which interrogates and throws into relief the religious politics which circumscribes and structurates this ruling epistemology.