A Question of Sport and Incarnational Theology

A Christian theology that is orientated towards understanding incarnation must be interested in the nature of embodiment. As the experience of those involved in sports centres on the body and its attunement to the situation and environment in which it finds itself, so we can compare the states of immersion in the material world in the athlete's experience and the experience of Christian piety. This essay offers a comparative phenomenology of two forms of embodiment: the athlete's entry into 'the zone' and the contemplative's centring of the embodied soul in Christ. In doing so it opens up areas of both similarity and difference that are coming to be explored by neuropsychology and neurophysiology. and points to the development of a radical account of incarnation that takes embodiment and affectivity seriously.