"A Silent Leap: Sport Beyond Ethics." In Sport and Religion: Antiquity, Modernity and Contemporaneity, pp. 41–51. Edited by Luísa Ávila da Costa and Constantino Pereira Martins. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Dialética. External Peer-reviewed Link PhilArchive
It is safe to say that the conjuncture of sport and religion has received scant attention in the mainstream of sports philosophy. In the recent voluminous and authoritative Routledge Handbook of Sports Philosophy (2017), for instance, the conjunct of religion and sport is only briefly mentioned in an article by Kenneth Aggerholm that sets out to describe a "secular reading of Kierkegaard." While his chief purpose is to describe how meaning may appear as revelation in sport, Aggerholm's Kierkegaard also holds the potential to reveal a transcendental reality – a sphere of the infinite – through the secular rituals of sport, and thus to bring the infinite in touch with our finite reality, enabling us to overcome our existential dread, our "sickness unto death," as Kierkegaard termed it. To Kierkegaard faith could never simply be pronounced as an attribute, it had to be experienced and lived-through, and this event of religion was characterised by his image of the "leap of faith," the moment when we suspend our ethical constraints and make a decision to, simply, believe. Cindy White (2004) has suggested that the grip with which sports capture our imagination is such that it can allow us to "forget what is good." Diego Maradona's infamous handball against England in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup comes to mind, a goal that Maradona himself characterised as scored by the "hand of God": condemned on account of its unethical breach of the rules of the game, the goal nonetheless revealed a domain of truth and "poetic" justice to those who cheered for Maradona's side.