This session focuses on PLAY, as opposed to sporting games and competition. Play is often contrasted with competitive games, as it is idealistically described at autotelic and somehow more innate than sport. However, as these papers suggest, play is not just creativity with the body without boundaries. Ethics, the other, and social norms are categories that each essay explores in their workings with the concept of play.
Levinas, Rowing, and Infinite Relationality
This paper explores the sport of rowing as a lived metaphor for Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of infinite responsibility and ethical relationality. Levinas posits that encountering the Other binds us in an inescapable ethical obligation, akin to the mutual dependence of rowers in a boat. The synchronicity and interdependence required in rowing reflect the Levinasian notions of proximity and transcendence, where the self is called beyond its own limitations through responsibility to teammates. The unspoken promise of reciprocity in rowing mirrors the ethical commitment Levinas describes, with each stroke representing a gesture toward the Other. Even when personal conflicts arise, the ethical bond remains unbroken, reinforcing the communal nature of responsibility. Through shared effort and pursuit of perfection, rowing transcends physical exertion and embodies an ethical and spiritual practice. In this way, the sport offers a profound reflection on relationality, sacrifice, and the infinite call to responsibility.
This paper proposes an interdisciplinary investigation into the connections between C. Thi Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency in gaming and Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory. While Nguyen explores how games structure and sculpt agency, offering unique aesthetic experiences through engagement with designed constraints, Rosa’s work on resonance provides a framework for understanding how individuals relate meaningfully to the world. By bringing these theories into dialogue, this paper argues that games can serve as privileged sites for the cultivation of resonant relationships, and that this has broader implications for religious ethics.
Yoga in church is a relatively new phenomenon. From being a practice associated with “Eastern” religiosity and culture, yoga is today widespread in the Western world and can be found in places such as gyms, schools, and health care. More recently, yoga has also traveled into new religious spaces, such as Christian monasteries and churches. This paper explores this phenomenon by taking departure in a qualitative empirical study of yoga services in the Church of Norway (CoN) and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark (ELCD). We ask: What happens when yoga goes to church? A particular focus is on how discontinuities are simultaneously re-established and bridged, especially regarding the use of the body. We argue that in these services, a dual boundary process of bodily hybridization on the one hand and wordily purification on the other takes place, displaying how discontinuities are both bridged and re-established.
| Eric Bain-Selbo | Ebainselbo@semo.edu | View |