Feminism and Football

Football Close Up

I am a quarterly blogger on the Feminism and Religion website.  My post up this week is on how race and privilege affected the NCAA investigation of the football program at University of North Carolina.  If you enjoyed the Calling Audibles series, you will want to check out this post.  If you are interested in issues of white privilege and race, you will want to read it, too.  And if you are just curious about how in the world feminism and football could possibly have anything to say to each other, then I hope you’ll read on and let me know what you think. Here are the first couple of paragraphs.

Calling Audibles Part XXIII: The Anatomy of the Asterisk

iStock asterisk

“White people are accountable for the ways in which we fail to hear and understand the needs and claims that other communities make upon us… white learning [often] comes at the expense of those already multiply harmed by white interpersonal and structural failures in perception, sensitivity, and justice.” –Aana Marie Vigen, “To Hear and to Be Accountable” in disrupting White Supremacy From Within:  White People on What We Need to Do” UNC just can’t seem to help itself. They keep worsting themselves with the football fiasco.  Now Hakeem Nicks, the all time best receiver ever to put on the Carolina blue… Read the full post

Calling Audibles Part XX: White Out

istock white out

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” ~1 John 1:8 Living a lie is a well-worn habit for human kind.   We human beings tend to avoid hard truths especially when they might mean we have to change.  The tenacity of our denial tends to increase the more there is to lose. I will confess my own shortcoming in the face of all of this football mess here at UNC—anger. There have been several angry moments during this situation for me.  Many have told me that my anger is justified. … Read the full post

Calling Audibles Part XVII: Game Plan

Game strategy drawn on blackboard

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts ~Isaiah 55: 8-9 Lots of people ask me what football coaches do while they are working all those long hours.  “What could they possibly be doing in there for all that time?”  Early on in our marriage, I use to ask my husband, John, the exact same question periodically.  During his years in the NFL the answer was mostly “watching film”… Read the full post

Calling Audibles Part XIV: Touchdowns for Jesus

iStock football and sky

What is impossible for us is possible for God. ~Luke 18:27 “Tell John Kasay that God doesn’t care about football.  She’s a baseball fan.” This was the witty retort of a minister friend of mine back in the late 1990s when my husband, John, was coaching for the Carolina Panthers.  We had lost a big game to Tampa Bay.  Kicker John Kasay had missed a field goal that could have won the game in the last few seconds. When asked about the missed kick in a post game press conference, Kasay suggested that the wind suddenly changed and that God… Read the full post