Scholar. Educator. Writer.

My primary research agenda attends to the cultural politics that emerge at the nexus of two of the most powerful forms of culture: religion and sport. I have examined this nexus in a number of sites and settings. For example, my article “Colin Kaepernick, Tim Tebow, and the Magic of Comparison” published in Culture & Religion (with Sam Winemiller and Natalie Welch) looks at the ways that sport media uses muscular Christianity as a white racial framing mechanism, using journalism about Colin Kaepernick and Tim Tebow as a comparative case study. Also using popular culture and media as a starting point, my book chapter in Religion & Sport in North America investigates the Christian-white cultural imaginary undergirding the claim that the film 300 is “the greatest Christian film of all time” - a claim I first encountered on a Christian film review site, but that indexes a common reconstruction of Spartan masculinity as Christian-white masculinity by American evangelicals. Looking to higher education and sports management as another site, my article “Contemporary Muscular Christian Values as Culturalized Religion” in the International Journal of Sport and Religion (with Robin Hardin and Steven Waller) re-theorizes muscular Christianity as a form of “culturalized religion.” Here we use survey data collected from sport management students to think about the ways that muscular Christianity has become entrenched in American sports culture to such a degree that it no longer appears particularly Christian, and is embraced widely even among those who do not identify as Christian.

I also take the corpus of scholarly writing on sport/religion as a site of investigation. My article “Re-telling the Story So Far” in Quest examines the Christianized historiographies that mostly comprise scholarly descriptions of the field of “sport and spirituality,” while my article in Psychology of Sport and Exercise offers a critique of second-generation mindfulness based interventions as practices and discourses that reproduce fixed and essentializing constructions of culture, despite their claims to cultural authenticity. My chapter “Wrestling with Repugnance” for the American Examples project intervenes in conversations in the anthropology of Christianity and American evangelicalism to think about “cultural repugnance” as an affective disposition with political implications for the guild of scholars studying “religion in America.” Most recently, my article “Sporting the Sacred” in Sociology of Sport Journal offers a re-description of sport/religion scholarship, arguing that the way the sport/religion discourse has been constructed reifies these twinned sui generis categories as decidedly uncritical objects of study. The results are approaches to studying religion/sport that, while “tired” and “weary” continue to traffic in liberal modern political taxonomies. “Religion” thus described lacks analytic precision as a scholarly category while additionally abrogating the extent to which, as a scholarly taxonomy, it exists in relation to colonial epistemologies and structures and racial formations.

In addition to primary research on religion and physical culture I co-edited Religion and Sport in Japan with Stephen Covell and Dennis Frost, and am the “Bodies” section editor of the forthcoming Springer Encyclopedia of Religion and Popular Culture.

As a secondary line of research, I lend my expertise in qualitative research methods and social theory to colleagues’ research. In this capacity I published a solo authored article on post-qualitative ethnography in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods and have contributed as a co-author to projects on Cherokee women’s stickball, the experiences of sport social workers, soccer in the US, and the gendered experiences of Ironwoman triathletes. These articles have appeared in outlets such Annals of Leisure Research, Journal of Applied Sport Management, International Sport Coaching Journal, Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education, and the Journal of Emerging Sport Studies.