The aim of this paper is to differentiate between religion and spirituality more strictly, or, specifically, between the religious and spiritual aspects of sport. The text is written in an autoethnographic genre from an ‘outsider’ position, by an author who is not Christian. Religion, including Christianity, represents a connectedness between the natural world and an ontologically different reality and its transcendence towards the sacrum. But spirituality is the centre of the human way of being and a manifestation of personality. So (...) spirituality and spiritual values can and should be an integral part of human movement, including sport, while any religion is not an inherent quality of sport but an external factor that is only accidentally associated with the area of human physical activity. Despite this fact, the argumentation leads toward a conclusion that sport can serve as a tool and means for the realization of Christian values. If the instrumentality of sport means the realization of love as a basic Christian attitude to all people, then this should be a positive outcome not only for religious people, but also for agnostics and even atheists. (shrink)

Two prevalent assumptions in the philosophy of sport literature are that all sports are games and that all games are contests, meant to determine who is the better at the skills definitive of the sport. If these are correct, it would follow that all sports are contests and that a range of sporting activities, including nature sports, are not in fact sports at all. This paper first confronts the notion that sport and games must seek to resolve skill superiority through (...) consideration of sport activities that have no such aim. The reduction of sport to game is also shown to be untenable and due to misunderstanding the point of sport activities, specifically, why people engage in them. This leads to reconsideration of the dominance of an instrumental conception of sport and the pursuit of excellence as anthropomaximising efficiency. The Norwegian tradition of frilutsliv is explored as a counterpoint to both conventional and nature sport. (shrink)