The author serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, highlighting his academic expertise and focus on the field of communication.
In his persuasive study The Eternal Present of Sport, Daniel Grano rethinks the sport-religion relationship by positioning sport as a source of theological trouble. Focusing on bodies, time, movement, and memory, he demonstrates how negative theology can be practically and theoretically useful as a critique of elite televised sport. Grano asserts that it is precisely through sport’s highest religious ideals that controversies are taking shape and constituting points of political and social rupture. He examines issues of transcendence, “legacy”—e.g., “greatest ever,” or “all-time”—and “witnessing” through instant replay, which undermine institutional authority. Grano also reflects on elite athletes representing especially powerful embodiments of religious and social conflict, including around issues related to gender, sexuality, ability doping, traumatic brain injury, and institutional greed. Elite sport is in a period of profound crisis. It is through the ideals Grano analyzes that we can imagine a radically alternative future for elite sport.
The essays in Sport, Rhetoric, and Political Struggle contextualize sport and political struggle, examine the mobilization of resistance in sporting contexts, identify ongoing stigmas that present limitations in and around sport, and attend to prevailing ideological features that provoke questions for future research.