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CHAPTER 9 Contact with God, Body, and Soul Sport History and the Radical Orthodoxy Project SYNTHIA SYDNOR In 1998 I composed a critique of sport history in the form of a postmodern essay entitled “A History of Synchronized Swimming.”1 In the essay, I wanted to challenge sport historians to go beyond easy alliances with social history and sociological models, and I wanted to explore practically how a specific sport history might look when disparate ideas labeled as postmodern such as those dealing with aesthetics, language and performance, or the thought of Michel Foucault informed it. Arching over these goals was my desire to expose the discourses of modernism, science, and the Enlightenment as they influenced, formed, and policed fields such as sport history with their assumed truths and hegemony. As I tried to accomplish in the “Synchronized Swimming” essay, postmodern thinkers criticized the Enlightenment project but offered no solution out of the postmodern dilemma they identified. If postmodernity is, as Zygmunt Bauman has aptly described, modernity censuring and assessing itself—a minute version of which I tried to contribute in my essay, then what follows postmodernity? In this chapter, I introduce and discuss an academic sensibility known as radical orthodoxy that I believe is one academic paradigm that has the capacity to further the postmodern project in sport history in significant ways. Radical orthodoxy thought holds that a theological sensibility and a sense of the sacred lie at the root of all knowledge work and that the task of understanding and revitalizing such relationships is part of postmodernism’s project that has yet to be fulfilled. Radical orthodoxy claims that for all humans to live in the world is sacramental/liturgical and 203 that postmodernism offers a language to recover for our time the world before and beyond the secular.2 Specifically, in terms of the academy, radical orthodoxy thinkers claim that only theology can embark upon and realize postmodern hope. Postmodernism is celebrated as a space in which “God emerges from the white-out nihilism of modern atheism . . . we [wait] patiently, [watch] constantly, [trace] endlessly the invisible as the visible, the divine as the corporeal . . . The task of understanding those relationships is part of postmodernism’s project.”3 For radical orthodoxy, the mystery of God is at the root of all knowledge work, and radical orthodoxy thinkers make a radical claim that all disciplines —science, social sciences, humanities and so on—are theological, that the “ultimate” social science4 and humanities is theology. This theology is not a theology that is fused to scientific or secular discourse as any other academic discipline but a radical “lived narrative which . . . projects . . . represents . . . and gives content to the notion of ‘God’. And in practice, providing such a content means making a historical difference in the world.”5 Most significantly, radical orthodoxy seems to answer questions of what is to follow postmodernism and how are the critiques of society that postmodernism aptly provided to be rectified. That is, radical orthodoxy holds that the standpoints that emerge from specific disciplinary theories and methodologies become more profoundly capable of truth, love, and beauty when they are based on other corporealities that are outside of modernity’s Enlightenment project. Radical orthodoxy is a poetics that goes beyond objectivity and subjectivity to theoretically challenge the world and the modern and postmodern critiques of that world. Radical orthodoxy has as its premise that “discourses about anything—language, the body, perception—can have meaning only if they acknowledge their participation in the transcendent.”6 Thus sport history informed by radical orthodoxy would go beyond science and cultural interpretation and push its discussion and performance into spaces such as those dealing with morality, holiness, the sacred, truth, and beauty. Also, some of the classic and current theoretical themes pursued by scholars working in sport history may be illuminated in new ways when viewed through the lens of radical orthodoxy. To explore this amazing idea—that we have to acknowledge and converse about our participation in the transcendent—in the following pages, I attempt to (1) overview the major thinkers and works of radical orthodoxy; (2) attend to the problem of understanding and critiquing radical orthodoxy in terms of sport history; (3) explore the thematic question, can the languages and practices of one’s religious faith be intellectually linked to reason and disciplinary knowledge such as sport history? Radical orthodoxy began and was so named at Cambridge in the early 1990s in the work of theologians Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and...

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