nfl

This victory won’t amount to much if Americans don’t understand why racist team names are a problem.

The league—and many fans—treat them as cogs without agency.

In Concussion, Dr. Bennet Omalu is a Nigerian immigrant and an outsider. This status is complicated by competing ideas of what America is.

Grantland Rice compared the Notre Dame backfield to the four horsemen. Marcia Mount Shoop realigns football with apocalyptic thought—and makes a theological critique of the sport's systemic dysfunction.

Almost a third of Protestant pastors think domestic violence is not a problem in their congregations. They're wrong.

(RNS) Too often, it can be easy to assume that some issues are less prevalent in the church. We forget that, as a collective of individuals shaped by the culture at large, sin is indiscriminate in whom it touches. Many church leaders do not realize that all evils are present in their congregations, especially sins that carry a heavy culture of silence.

A new LifeWay Research poll shows that 74 percent of pastors misjudge the prevalence of sexual and domestic violence within their congregations.

America is extraordinarily tolerant of the NFL. “Pro football, it seems, can do anything but drive us away,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal in August. He described moves the NFL has made that would ruin another business: undercut your partners, maintain a nonprofit status while paying huge executive salaries, accept unnecessary public subsidies, stay out of Los Angeles so your teams can use the prospect of moving there as leverage to keep demanding those subsidies.

And this: alienate women, who make up 45 percent of the NFL’s viewership.

The NFL gambled on fans’ willingness to endure the replacement refs. It was wrong—a good development for whatever ethical margin a football fan might claim.

A friend sent me
an e-mail before yesterday's Steelers-Broncos playoff game. He titled it, "The
Steelers vs. God. Want to have brunch?"