Tag: Brian Hillman

From the game’s early days, college football and a strain of muscular Christianity built a mutually reinforcing culture that taught lessons in America’s dominant religious, gendered, and racial belief systems. In his book The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in Twentieth-Century America (University of Illinois Press) Hunter M. Hampton analyzes the impact of football on Christian college campuses. Brian Hillman is our reviewer, and although he would have liked to hear more of student voices and views, he still finds Hampton’s effort to be an enjoyable-to-read monograph..

In The Myth of Michael Jordan in Popular Culture (Routledge), Tomasz Jacheć examines the life and career of Michael Jordan, one of the greatest athletes in the history of sports, asking how he transcended his sport to become a canonical myth in popular culture. In his review, Brian Hillman notes that the author uses the framework of the “hero’s journey” from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and makes good use of the “mytheme” concept. Our reviewer concludes that Jacheć’s effort is an exemplary academic engagement with popular culture.