Podcasts about sports institute

Shane Bowyer: professor of management at MSU Mankato and local community pillar! Our guest this week has an incredible range of expertise in the business sector; overseeing the Northwoods League Baseball Franchise as a general manager, owner of the Sports Institute training facility, and so much more right here in our community. Join us as Shane takes us through his most memorable experiences, and the core mission of service that's kept him active in Southern Minnesota. Stay tuned for minute 1:44:03, where Shane shares some of his favorite experiences working with the Minnesota Vikings

In this conversation, Paul Putz discusses the intersection of faith and sports, exploring how sports can serve as a platform for Christian identity and community. He shares his personal journey from a small-town upbringing to leading the Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University. The discussion delves into the history of the Christian athlete movement, the role of sports in American Christianity, and the opportunities and challenges that arise for Christians in the sports world. - Website: cfc.sebts.edu - Contact us: cfc.sebts.edu/about/contact-us/ - Support the work of the Center: cfc.sebts.edu/about/give/ All opinions and views expressed by guest speakers are solely their own. They do not speak for nor represent SEBTS. Read our expressed views and confessions: www.sebts.edu/about/what_we_believe.aspx

As March Madness kicks off today, I thought I would post a podcast conversation with my friend Paul Putz. Paul is the author of "Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big Time Sports" and is the Director of the Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University. In this podcast, we talk about Paul's high school coach, leadership lessons from the book, and make some picks for both Final Fours.

In this episode of the Just Schools Podcast, Jon Eckert interviews Paul Putz, director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University, where he helps to lead and develop online programming and curriculum as well as assisting with communications and strategic planning. They discuss his journey from high school teacher and coach to historian, diving into insights from his new book, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports. Putz reflects on the role of sports in K-12 education and the importance of of resilience, collaboration, and integrating faith into leadership in both education and sports. The Just Schools Podcast is brought to you by the Baylor Center for School Leadership. Each week, we'll talk to catalytic educators who are doing amazing work. The Center for School Leadership and Faith & Sports Institute are partnering together for a summer professional event! Join us for the FIT (faith-integration-transformation) Sports Leadership Summit! We will gather at Baylor to empower and equip Christian sports leaders in K-12 schools to lead, serve, and educate well as they pursue competitive excellence. Be encouraged. Mentioned: The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports by Paul Putz Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David Maraniss. Faith & Sports Institute Youth Sports Summit  Connect with us: Baylor MA in School Leadership EdD in K-12 Educational Leadership Jon Eckert LinkedIn X: @eckertjon Center for School Leadership at Baylor University: @baylorcsl   Jon Eckert: All right, so we've got Paul Putz here in the podcast studio and we get to talk about a new book. We get to talk about coaching, we get to talk about teaching. So Paul, it's a huge blessing to have you here today. Can you just give us a little bit of your background about how you got to this office today, where you came through as a student and professionally? Paul Putz: Yeah. Well, I started, we'll start with I'm a teacher at heart and was a teacher, a high school teacher. So I grew up in small town Nebraska and playing all the sports thinking that I'm going to become a coach. So I went off and played small college basketball and then wanted to hang around sports. And so I got my secondary ed degree, was a social studies teacher. And as I started teaching in Omaha, Nebraska, I had a sense of how important sports were to me in terms of forming me. I was a pretty good student too, but sports mattered to me on a deeper level. And so I was really intrigued about learning more about sports. As I'm teaching social studies classes, I'm thinking about, man, how historically did we get to a place where sports are part of a school curriculum where sports are actually seen as educational or sports are seen as formative? I was just so curious about that. So instead of becoming a coach as a high school teacher, I get my master's in history and I start exploring these questions about the history of sports and as connections with Christianity. So those sort of questions I was wrestling with as a high school teacher lead me to applying to Baylor, coming to Baylor to get a PhD teaching at Messiah University for a year, and then coming back to Truett Seminary where I lead the Faith & Sports Institute and have been involved with FSI for the past five years. Jon Eckert: So love the work you do. I also understand from guys who still are able to play basketball with you, I have not been able to, as my knee no longer allows it, but you have a nice mid-range game still. Paul Putz: Old school. We keep it old school. Yeah. Jon Eckert: That's great. That makes Nebraska and Indiana boys proud. So love that. And I love the journey that you took. You go into education thinking you're going to coach and you're going to teach, and then you go down this history path, which then leads you to leading a Faith & Sports Institute. So it's kind of funny the way the Lord weaves us through these paths. And then to this book that's been published by Oxford University Press, really nice book by the way. Paul Putz: Thank you. Jon Eckert: Much nicer production than I typically get in the books that I write. So I'm impressed with what Oxford's done with it. The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports. It says it's this fascinating look at the overlap and the way Christianity and major college sports and professional sports have been woven together starting in the 1920s. So tell us how you got to this book from that journey you just described. Paul Putz: Yeah, I think so many authors say their book is in some sense autobiographical. You have a question that you want to think about and in the process of exploring your own questions, you kind of realize, hey, other people might be asking these questions too. So that's how it started for me. I mentioned I'm growing up in Nebraska, I was a pastor's kid, I was also loving sports. And so this idea of being a Christian and being an athlete were so central to how I saw myself. And so when I did pursue the PhD and became a historian exploring sports in Christianity, it was my desire to figure out where did I come from? How was my high school basketball coach, Joel Heeser, who's a friend of mine now still coaching high school basketball? How did he learn what it means to be a Christian athlete, a Christian coach? And so out of that kind of sense of curiosity and a sense of where's my own place in this story, I went and do what historians do. So we go back to the archives and we try to look at the origins and we look at the cultural context and we try to figure out cause and change over time and how did this happen and how did it influence culture and how did culture influence what was going on? And so that's what I got to spend five years doing. It started as a PhD doctoral project. I'm going to archives across the US and I'm looking at memos and documents, and going to the libraries and just trying to tease out how this space to bring together sports and faith developed and then how it evolved and advanced to the place where it shaped my life and shaped the lives of so many others in America. Jon Eckert: That's well said and a great setup to the book. And one of the things that kind of blew my mind, and it's just in the introduction to your book, you have this comment here, "Compared with 100 years ago, there are far more athletes and coaches today willing to publicly champion Christianity as a formative influence in their lives." So I think sometimes in the US we feel like we're in this post-Christian world. And in some ways it's a very different world, especially when you hear athletes as soon as they're interviewed after a game, immediately giving credit to God and giving glory to God and the Steph Currys of the world and any number of football players. And you see this over and over and over again. And that wasn't the case a hundred years ago, probably because sports weren't as, they didn't have the platform that they do now. But as you've written the book, what do you attribute that to the most? I know that's the point of the whole book, but can you distill that down to two or three points for the people listening and why you think that's the case? Paul Putz: Yeah, what I try to suggest in the book is the blending of sports and Christianity kind of happens in two phases. And so I start in the 1920s, but there's this era before the 1920s, we'll say goes from after the Civil War until the 1920s. And it's during this era there's a movement called, muscular Christianity. And what muscular Christianity does is it helps Christians see the value of the body, the value of physical activity to moral formation. And it's out of muscular Christianity, which is a movement that starts in England and then it comes to the United States. It's out of muscular Christianity that a lot of these ideas about character formation in sports are developed. And it's why sports become connected to schools and education because people and school leaders are trying to figure out how do we channel this interest that our students have in athletic activity into productive ways so we can use it to form and shape them as good citizens. So muscular Christianity is kind of the first stage, which again connects sports to Christian mission with this character building way. And it has a profound effect. I mean, some of the sports we play today are products of muscular Christianity. And the classic example is basketball, 1891, James Naismith enrolls at a Christian college in Springfield, part of the YMCA. And when he enrolls at the school, he said his desire was to win men for the master through the gym. So he has a Christian purpose, a Christian mission at a Christian school, and he creates basketball to advance these muscular Christian ideas. Jon Eckert: And I didn't realize this, but in the book you highlight, Naismith is the only coach in Kansas history that has a losing record. Paul Putz: Only coach with a losing record. Jon Eckert: Because he didn't care. Paul Putz: He didn't... And this is such an important point because in that first era there were some real idealistic people like Naysmith who thought sport legitimately as first and foremost for moral formation, it's about developing people. Win or lose doesn't matter. So that's the first era. 1920s comes along and it's pretty clear that sports has developed into something else. Sports is connected to commercialization, winning comes first. Even at colleges it was supposed to be educational, but it's clear that at the college level, if you're a coach, you might be a great molder of young men, but if you don't win games, you're getting fired. Jon Eckert: Right. Paul Putz: So there's this sense in the 1920s, this reality sets in that sport is now commercialized. It's big time. And even though it's still connected to say college, at the big time level, that muscular Christian mission isn't there. So what my book tries to do is say, okay, when muscular Christianity is sort of on the back burner because we now have this big time sports structure in the 1920s where it's all commercialized, it's all celebrity, how do Christians still engage in that? How do they wrestle with that tension of a, when at all cost atmosphere, a space where Christians don't determine the culture of sports they're guests in this culture and how do they create a space to still cultivate and nurture Christian athletes and coaches there? And that's where we see in the 1920s, very few Christians able to navigate that. There's just a handful of them who can be in major league baseball or can be in big time college athletics and still feel strong about their Christian commitments. But a hundred years later, we now see all sorts of Christian athletes and coaches who are comfortable in those spaces. And you kind of asked what drove that. What I would say drives that is the formation of a community that was embedded within sports institutions, that creates a sense of shared mission, shared purpose, and that over generations continue to invite more people in, continue to develop and just kind of under the radar, ministry of presence was just there and available to help athletes and coaches identify as Christians in that space. So it really comes down to the creation of these networks and organizations like the Fellowship of Christian athletes, like athletes in action, like Pro Athletes Outreach, like Baseball Chapel, people starting something new and then sustaining it over time and seeing the ripple effects years later. Jon Eckert: The beautiful example and what I had just finished this summer, this, Path Lit by Lightning, it's the Jim Thorpe book. Have you read this? Paul Putz: Yes, I have. Fantastic book. Jon Eckert: Such a fascinating read, because it's in this, leading up to the 1920s, his career is this amateur versus professional, which he gets caught and just treated so poorly and Pop Warner, the king of amateur child sports that we have Pop Warner leagues all over, kind of a horrific human being in the way they exploited people and they did it through sports. But he started his career at the Carlisle Indian School, which was one of the horrific experiments in US history when we took students off from their families off of reservations to try to quote, unquote civilize them into these things. And sports were a major part of it. So in our conversation, I'd love to pivot a little bit, well maybe not even pivot, but integrate sports into what K-12 education has been because still most places other than maybe Friday night lights in Texas football, most K-12 sports are not big time sports yet that most of the athletes playing sports there. You would make the case that the extracurricular there is to support the moral development. It's not a huge money sport until you get into the AAU stuff and some of those things where you have revenue, but K-12 systems, it's still more about that and it's been used for a lot of good things. And then in some cases, in Jim Thorpe's example, it was good kind of. So could you integrate those a little bit and how you see K-12 sports still having an influence and where Christian coaches and Christian athletes have a spot in that? Paul Putz: Yeah, yeah, you're right. There is a difference. And that muscular Christian ideal still continues in some ways, certainly even at the big time sports level. There's elements of it, but especially I think when we get into K-12 or if we get into division three small colleges. Jon Eckert: Yes. Paul Putz: There's a better chance to I think fully integrate the sports experience with the mission of the school. And at the same time, I would say the trends that we see at the highest levels of sports, your professional leagues, those do filter down because kids are looking to athletes as celebrities and heroes. So they're emulating them in some ways. So even though at the K-12 level and the small college level, there's a difference structurally and financially, you still have people who are formed and shaped by what they're seeing in these images in this culture. Now at the same time, I do think in terms of the growth of sports in what we've seen, I think we saw really a century from the 1920s until the last 10 years of continual development of sports as a central part of education in the United States. And this was done intentionally through organizations and networks like coaches associations, high school athletic associations. These develop in the 1920s and after the 1940s and 1950s, they sort of take on this professional identity. There was a period in time where to be a coach at a high school, you were seen as like, well, you're not really part of what's going on at the school. And so it took time for coaches to establish a professional identity linking it with education. And that evolved over the course of, again, a hundred years from the 1920s into the present. But these coaches and athletic directors, I have a quote in my book where I mentioned this, they intentionally had this vision for cultivating in young people a love of sports, because they thought through sports we can instill good values for American citizens or if you're at a Christian school you can instill Christian values. And so at the K-12 level, sports were always connected with some sort of vision beyond just the game. It was more than a game. It was about who you're becoming as a person. It was about learning life lessons and it sounds like a platitude. We've all heard this and we've also, I'm sure seen hypocrisy where we know of a coach who says this, but it doesn't seem like it plays out that way. But there's also some deep truth to that. I think anyone listening to this, if you've played a sport at the high school level that formed and shaped you, maybe in some bad ways, but in some good ways too. And so I think there is a power to sports that continues to have relevance and resonance today. I will say in more recent years we're seeing some really big shifts with K-12 school. With club sports, with travel sports. And there's some ways that that sense of community identity that was tied into the school level, it doesn't exist everywhere. There's pockets where it does. But in some places, some of the best athletes are now not connected to their school. And so for the future, I worry about what will it look like in 40, 50, 60 years where sports could be such an important part of a community and neighborhood identity at a school level. Will that go away as more and more athletes maybe turn to different models to pursue their dreams and goals? Some people in education might say that's healthy. They might say we need to separate education from sports. For me, and maybe I'm naive, but I think there's something important and beautiful about linking sports to education. But we do have to have guard rails and we do have to have people fighting to do it the right way. Jon Eckert: I completely agree. I want to see sports, I want to see all extracurriculars integrated well into what's going on in the classroom. I think that provides more holistic place for kids to learn is where kids can be more engaged and kids can flourish in areas where they may not flourish in one classroom, but they might flourish with an instrument they might flourish in a club or with sports. And I think sports are a powerful place for that. I do know with some states moving to NIL deals for high school athletes, that completely changes the dynamic and is really disconcerting for me because in that case, unlike colleges where that athlete is generating revenue for the school, it's hard to argue that the gate attendance at the high school game is really that much impacted by an individual athlete. But that's coming and that is the world we're living in. And that's some of that trickle-down effect that you described. I never want to be the sky is falling person. I'm thrilled that we have a 12 team playoff system in college football. I'm also not ignorant of the fact that, that completely changes the dynamics of the economics of the sport. So what I'd like to say is Christian leaders, because our set in the Interfaith Sports Institute and the Center, we overlap in some really good ways. What I'd like to see is what you described about the athletes in the twenties and thirties, creating these associations and these communities that fly under the radar of just inviting people in because I think that's what as Christians we should be doing in whatever we're called to. So do you see overlap for Christian administrators and teachers for how we can represent Christ well in the platforms big or small that we have? Do you see any lessons that we can take away as educators from what you found from your athletes in the book? Paul Putz: I think so. I think probably one of the most important, or I guess if I were to highlight two things. One is I would say there's lots of different ways to do it. Jon Eckert: Yes. Paul Putz: I think sometimes a certain person or a certain organization, they come up with a way that works really well for them and then they hold fast to that as if this is the way, this is the biblical way, this is the Christian way. And what I would want to say is it's a part of a conversation. Different contexts need different resources, different methods. And the way God made us as a community talks about the diversity of strengths we have in giftings and callings. And so I think one thing to learn is you can learn from other people who have methods and approaches when it comes to integrating faith in sports. And you probably also have something to offer to that conversation too. So if we can hold what we do loosely, but also not in a way that shies away from the calling to step up as Christian leaders and to say there is a way to engage in sports that reflects my convictions, but then also in a way where there's a sense of humility that I can learn from others. I don't have it all figured out. A bunch of Christians before me have messed up as they're trying to do this, but they've also done some good stuff along the way. And I think that can give us freedom to try, probably to fail, but to maybe advance the conversation forward. So that's one piece. And the other piece is I think it's simply expect tension, expect that there's not an easy overlap between the culture of sports and Christianity. I think there are certain elements to sports that I'm really drawn to. I'm competitive. I love the competitiveness of sports. I want to have the winner. For me, there's a drive for all of that. Jon Eckert: You're not James Naismith, is that what you're saying? Paul Putz: I'm not. I love James Naismith, but for me, boy, I want to, I'm kind of like, I want to win. Jon Eckert: You can be John Wooden. He wanted win too. Paul Putz: There you go. That's right. He did it. The quiet winner. But biblically, there are all sorts of messages, passages, commands from Jesus that tell us that his kingdom is upside down. It's different than the way the world works. And sports culture so often has a certain way where we prioritize the winner. We maybe give our attention to the star athlete. And that type of culture, it's really difficult to fully, fully integrate that into this full-fledged view of Christian faith. And especially because sports is also a pluralistic space where you're going to have people of all different faith, traditions, race, ethnicity, backgrounds, which is beautiful. But it also means let's just have some realistic expectations for what we can accomplish in sports, realizing tension's going to exist. It's the already not yet tension. We live after Jesus's life, death and resurrection before he comes to make it fully complete. And so in the midst of that, we can witness to Christ's way right now and point to glimpses of his coming kingdom. But let's not have this sense of maybe an idealistic perfectionist bent that insists or expects that we're going to round out all the sharp edges of sports. There's going to be tension there. Jon Eckert: And so as educators, the beautiful thing, I got to teach coach for years and what I loved about it was I love basketball, but it wasn't going over the same play for the fourth year in a row. And the 50th practice that I've done it was seeing how individuals came to that and what skills you had and how you could put them in place to be successful. And so when I taught a science lab the 16th time I taught the science lab, I knew what was going to happen with the chemical reaction, but it was fun to see through the eyes of the kids that were there. So the more diverse and pluralistic the classroom of the team is, the more interesting it is to see that through all those different perspectives. And I think that's really how God sees us anyway. And so there's beauty in that and it's not a challenge to be overcome. It's the beauty of being in the world that every person is made in the image of God, whether they're the guy on the end of the bench or the best player on the team, or the kid that struggles in the science lab and flourishes in the art classroom. That kid is fascinating. And then you can't give up on that kid. And so the great coaches don't give up on players. It's why I'm super curious to see how Bill Belichick does at University of North Carolina, having been a pro coach for so many years where it is like, yeah, you've got to recruit well, but you also have to build a culture where your team, and that's harder to do now than ever because of what's going on in the transfer portal. And I don't like this, so I'm going to leave. And at least in the classroom, for the most part, we get a kid for the year and we get to be with them. We get to walk alongside them for a time and help them become more of who they're created to be and then pass them off to the next person. So I know in the Faith and Sports Institute, this is a lot of what you're trying to do through sports and how you integrate faith well. So talk a little bit about any events you have coming up or what you hope to do through that. Paul Putz: Yeah, well one thing we are excited about is the stuff we get to do with you, the Center for School Leadership. I think just over the past couple of years we've connected and collaborated. We've hung out and [inaudible 00:22:43] Jon Eckert: Board, you're on our advisory board board. Paul Putz: I often tell people, CSL think is one of the best things Baylor has going for it. And that's because I was a high school teacher and I see the sort of leaders that are developed through CSL. And so I immediately wanted to get connected and to see some overlap. I also knew sports is so central to education, and I know you have many coaches and athletic directors who come through your degree programs. And so it's been fun just to explore together some of the ways we can partner. So we do have, in June, we're actually going to be putting on at Baylor in conjunction with Baylor Athletics Center for School Leadership, faith and Sports Institute. We're going to have a little Christian Leadership Summit event. We're going to gather people together who are interested in these questions of faith and sport integration and how do you compete with excellence, but with Christian values and perspective. And so we're real excited about that. We have other events that we're doing in February, we're hosting a youth sports event, thinking about how the church navigates youth sports issues. And that's going to be February 7th and eighth here at Truett Seminary in Waco. And then in next summer, July, late July, we're hosting the Global Congress on Sport and Christianity. This is more of an academic gathering. We're bringing in scholars who do research on sports and Christianity, but we're also bringing in some thoughtful practitioners, some chaplains, some coaches, some athletic directors, people who have thought deeply about sports and faith. And it's a shared conversation. So a lot of what we try to do with the Faith and Sports Institute, convene people, have conversations, collaborate, bring people together. And we do have some grad programs and online certificate programs. So we have some educational pieces that are foundational to what we do, but also we have these just public facing programs and collaboration opportunities that I'm real excited about. Jon Eckert: Love that. And I love being at a place like Baylor where there's so many good things going on. As a center, we get to partner with you, we get to partner with Baylor Athletics. Anything Coach Drew does, I will happily support. Paul Putz: 100%. Jon Eckert: So we have so many great people like that. So that's a blessing. And I know we're almost out of time, so I'm going to do our lightning round because we really need to do the lightning round. But I want to start with this. What's the biggest challenge you see facing Christian coaches and educators right now? Paul Putz: I think it's margin and time, and the demands of the job. It seems there's more and more responsibility, and for good reasons. It's because there's these issues. It's mental health. We want to care for the kids. And there's all these challenges kids face now you need to figure that out, because if you're going to teach the kid, you better know what you're doing. And it just seems like I was last a high school teacher 11 years ago. I don't know that that world exists now 10 years later. It's totally different when I hear what educators are going through. I think for coaches as well, you've talked about it with NIL, it feels so new. I would just say some margin, some grace, some space, some sense of community. And then through that, maybe we can figure out some healthier rhythms because it's unsustainable with the way it is now. So that's one thing I see just with the people I've been around, and I know we've talked a little bit about this too, it's something... We need each other. At the end of the day, we need each other for this. Jon Eckert: Yeah. Best advice you've ever received? Paul Putz: I would say, I'm going to, boy, here's what I'll go with. John Wilson said this, "Let a thousand flowers bloom," was what he said. And he was talking about in the context of academics who kind of try to claim their territory, their space, and kind of own it. And his perspective was, let's encourage it all. Let's let it all grow. Don't try to cultivate your little space, a little thousand flowers bloom. It's going to look more beautiful and let's encourage one another along the way. And so that's the first thing that to mind. If I were to think more, I might have something else, but that's something I've been continually reminded of is how much we need each other and how much we need to encourage one another. And how much there is when we look out from ourselves and see the other work that's being accomplished. There's so much to support and encourage. Jon Eckert: That's good. I always like what comes to mind first. So that's good. Worst advice you've ever received? Paul Putz: Worst advice... Jon Eckert: Or given? Paul Putz: Or given? I've probably given some bad advice. I cannot think of... There's nothing specific that's coming to mind. That's for worst advice probably because sort of just went in one ear and out the other. Jon Eckert: That's good. Paul Putz: Gosh, I've run a total blank. You stumped me. [inaudible 00:27:39] Yeah. I'll circle back. I'm going to email you, if I can think of one after. Jon Eckert: You have to have gotten bad advice from a coach or from about coaching. That's where some of the worst advice I've ever received about coaching. Paul Putz: Well, I'll tell you. So this isn't necessarily advice, but I have heard a coach say, and this is about being a Christian, basically it was, "Hey, when you're a Christian, when you step onto that field, you're someone else. You're totally someone else. You can become whatever you want to be there." So there you go. That's some bad advice. Jon Eckert: Yeah. That's good. Paul Putz: As Christians, sports are part of life. So we don't separate who we are as Christians, we don't compartmentalize. So there you go. Worst advice is that you can separate who you are in the field to play. Jon Eckert: So if you had to distill down into a sentence your one takeaway piece of advice for somebody who wants to write a book, I talk to a lot of educators who run to write a book, you've now written a book. Any nugget that as an encouragement or as a discouragement, like, "Hey, think about this." What would you say? Paul Putz: I would say you got to write it for yourself. You got to care about it. And it's got to be important for you that you put this out because there's a ton of great books out there. You're not going to get rich off writing books. It's got to be because you're passionate about it. For yourself, not in the sense of to glorify yourself, for yourself in the sense that I have these words that I think could be helpful if I get it out. And the other thing is resilience. You got to be willing to sit down in that chair and write when you don't feel like it. Get that draft out, edit, revise. So it's resilience. And it's also a real calling that these words need to be out there. Jon Eckert: Yeah. Well, you said you were not going to make money on this. I've heard you refer to yourself as the John Grisham of sports historians. Paul Putz: There's only... Yeah, of sports and Christianity in America. Historians. There's like two of us. Jon Eckert: That's good. No, no, that's good. It's so true about the books and not getting rich, and you do have to have something that you feel so deeply that you need to get out there that it's going to drive you on those days you don't want to do it. So that's good advice. Last question, what makes you most hopeful as you look ahead, as an educator, as somebody who's interested in sports, what makes you most encouraged? Paul Putz: I think it's being around people who we're in this with, it's about the people we're in it with. There's a lot that I can get discouraged about when I see the news and it feels like there's so much that's changing. But then I'm around people who are saying, "You know what? This is a time we lived in. We didn't choose this time, but here we are, and what are we going to give up? We're going to say, oh, it's hopeless." No, it's the people. It's looking for people who want to find solutions and who realize young people are growing up. They're being shaped and formed right now. And if we're not in that work, what are we doing to shape the future? So that's more than anything. It's just being around people who are willing to put in the work, even in the face of the struggles. Jon Eckert: Well, until wrap up, I'm grateful that you decided not to take your talents to the NBA, but you brought them into academia and you brought those loves together. So I really appreciate your partnership and you being here today. Paul Putz: Thanks so much. Really appreciate you and the work you do.

Character formation is a foundational element of the Baylor student-athlete experience, and a new grant will enable Baylor to deepen work in this area through a partnership between the Faith and Sports Institute in Truett Seminary and Baylor Athletics. In this Baylor Connections, Paul Putz of the Faith and Sports Institute, along with Cori Bolts and Kenny Boyd of Baylor Athletics, takes listeners inside their collaborative work and examine opportunities to better serve student-athletes in the area of Christian character development.

The countdown is on! The 4th Global Congress on Sport and Christianity is about a year away, set for July 31-August 2, 2025 at Baylor University in Waco, TX.  Dr. Paul Putz, Director of the Faith & Sports Institute run by Truett Seminary is leading the effort and give us a sneak peak at how […]

In this episode, our host, Dan Hummel, talks with Paul Putz, the director of the Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary, and discusses the intersection of faith and sports from a historical perspective. He shares his personal interest in sports and how it led him to study the topic academically. Paul highlights the cultural significance of sports and the narratives they create. He also discusses the role of sports in shaping identity and community. Paul emphasizes the importance of meeting students where they are in their love for sports while also introducing them to a historical perspective. In this conversation, Paul Putz discusses the intersection of sports and Christianity, focusing on sports' historical and cultural context. He emphasizes contextualizing texts and understanding the cultural meaning of sports events and narratives.----

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games presents an opportunity for the South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) to conduct expanded testing sessions to discover potential world class athletes who could compete at these Games.Typically, an athlete who represents Australia at an Olympic/Paralympic level will have spent between 7-10 years in a sport development pathway before emerging as a senior international athlete.Given the Brisbane 2032 Olympics/ Paralympics are less than 10 years away, the process of identifying and developing talented athletes is crucial in ensuring that South Australia is able to produce medal winning athletes for the 2032 Australian Olympic and Paralympic teams.Two Talent Search sessions will be held in the April school holidays with the first taking place today (15 April) and the second happening on Monday 22 April. The tests conducted range from generic fitness testing, to sport specific tests across sports that SASI works with - athletes could discover that they excel in a sport they have never tried before!If athletes continue to develop and succeed in each talent development stage, they will eventually receive a SASI scholarship which gives them access to all of SASI's high-performance services including movement science, athlete wellbeing, nutrition and strength and conditioning. In this segment, we hear from Simon Cain, who has more than 15 years' experience managing high performance elite teams and programs. He has been with SASI for the past eight years and is the Manager for Sports and Programs. Max Liebeknecht is a sprint cyclist within the SASI cycling program. His potential to achieve cycling success was picked up through the SASI Talent Search Program. 

Cindy White serves as the Program Director at Baylor University/Truett Seminary's Faith and Sports Institute and is motivated to help young people aspire to true greatness in their sports and life. She also is an adjunct professor at Truett Seminary and facilitates ministry in Baylor Athletics. In addition, Cindy is co-leading the effort to expand Truett's Sports Ministry Program to online and modular education for practitioners in sports. Cindy grew up in Akron, Ohio, in a family of nine where she played volleyball, basketball, and softball competitively. She went on to earn All-American honors in volleyball and graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in Health, Physical Education, and Recreation with graduate studies in Exercise Physiology. Following a year of coaching at The University of Texas, Cindy received an M.A. from Moody Bible Institute in Biblical Studies and Ministry, which prompted her to pioneer the women's campus ministry with Athletes in Action, where she has served for 35 years. Baylor Seminary Certificate: https://www.baylor.edu/truett/index.php?id=963943  In this conversation with Chad, Cindy discusses: What every coach needs from their community How to avoid burnout Dealing with past, pain, and suffering ----more---- NEW SPONSOR: Jesus Loves You Ball Jesus Loves You Ball exists to equip multiplying disciples to utilize the platform of sports to share the love of Jesus. They utilize a digital resource connected through a QR code on high quality soccer balls that contain videos, Bible verses, and other interactive options which make it easy to communicate the Gospel in 112 languages. "Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does." Partner with us in spreading the global Gospel through the global game. They are offering a 33% percent discount on preorders through March 10. Utilize discount code "christcoachpod" for funds from your purchase to go back to supporting the Christian Coach Podcast. Visit www.jesuslovesyouball.com to learn more. ----more---- Listen to it on your favorite podcast player: https://plinkhq.com/i/1536134061?to=page  Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/christcoachpod Follow us on IG: www.instagram.com/christcoachpod ----more---- Buy Chad's book, The Freshman: https://amzn.to/3sFiM6P Buy Gian's book, The Court of Excellence: https://amzn.to/44GthUC Buy Jim's book, Good stuff God stuff: https://amzn.to/3Z6VfrO

The Apostle Paul loved sports analogies. He told the Corinthians to run their race to win the prize and that he did not fight as one who "beats the air." The author of Hebrews told his readers to "throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and to run with perseverance the race set before us." Sports mirror the Christian walk. This week on Honestly, Though, Dr. Paul Putz, the Program Director for the Master of Arts in Theology and Sports Studies and Assistant Director for the Faith & Sports Institute at Truett Theological Seminary sits down with Rebecca Carrell and Nika Spaulding to discuss the intersection of sports and faith and how it points us to Christlikeness.We love hugs! And when you rate, review, and share Honestly, Though on Apple Podcasts (and all podcast platforms), we see it immediately, and it feels just like a big, warm hug. Thank you in advance for taking an extra moment to make sure others find us in the algorithms. And speaking of finding us...Honestly, Though: @honestlythoughthepodcast (FB & IG(Rebecca Carrell: https://www.rebeccacarrell.com/ ; IG - @RebeccaCarrell ; Twitter: @RebeccaACarrell ; FB - Rebecca Ashbrook CarrellLiz Rodriguez: IG: @lizannrodriguez ; FB - Liz Rodriguez - https://www.facebook.com/liz.rodriguez.92775Nika Spaulding: stjudeoakcliff.org ; IG - @NikaAdidas ; Twitter - @NikaAdidasWe have the world's best producer! Are you interested in podcasting? Do you know someone who is? Taylor Standridge can help with audio engineering, production, editing, show mapping, and coaching. Connect with Taylor at taylorstandridge1@gmail.com or on Twitter: @TBStandridge

“How do we design tech and tech solutions to almost combat [other] tech solutions and distractions?”The question is posed by Brian Cunniffe of the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], who is Joe Lemire and John Portch's first guest on The People Behind the Tech podcast for 2024.Brian, a performance lead at the UKSI who works primarily in canoeing and who also served as the British and Irish Lions' sports scientist on tours of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, is discussing the power in gamifying training, particularly for younger athletes.“There's a slight irony in there but how do we bring it back to the stuff that matters, not just for players but for staff as well?” he continues. “How do we help coaches on a journey to understand not just the stuff that players have completed but maybe some of the decisions that we need to take on a journey and learn from that so that we're not replicating or duplicating and can be more efficient with our time?”Elsewhere, Brian delves into:The reasons why he is not driven to be a domain expert [6:00];The mismatch of the tacit knowledge of coaching and the newer objective of monitoring athletes [13:00];The under-appreciated importance of design thinking and bringing people on a journey [18:00];The performance promise contained in epigenetics [31:00].Joe Lemire LinkedIn | XJohn Portch LinkedIn | XListen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

Paul Putz is the Assistant Director of the Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University's Truett Seminary. His research and writing has been featured at Christianity Today, Slate, National Public Radio and more.  Today on the podcast, we talk to Paul Putz and explore the history of sports and faith, the birth of sports ministries FCA, AIA and PAO and look at some of the influential figures that have lived out their faith publicly including James Naismith, John Wooden, Jackie Robinson, Tony Dungy, Reggie White and Tim Tebow.  Sign up for our Sports Spectrum Magazine and receive 15% off a 1-year subscription by using the code PODCAST15 http://SportsSpectrum.com/magazine 

The South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) is holding its Talent Search program in the October school holidays, to identify young people with the potential to represent Australia at the 2032 Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games.Sessions will be held at SASI's Kidman Park headquarters, the Lights Community and Sports Centre, and Sacred Heart College. A testing session specific to Paralympic athletes will also be held during the October school holidays.In this segment, we hear from manager of Sports and Programs at South Australian Sports Institute, Simon Cain and Commonwealth Games gold medalist and cycling graduate, Sophie Edwards.

On this episode of HSS Presents, Dr. Anil S. Ranawat, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports injuries of the hip, knee and shoulder at HSS, speaks with Dr. Andreas H. Gomoll, a fellow Sports Institute orthopedic surgeon specializing in joint preservation of the knee and shoulder. The discussion covers a variety of topics ranging from traditional arthroplasty and injections to more advanced concepts of osteotomy, with the primary focus on alternatives to arthroplasty.

Paul Putz serves as the assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute, part of the Truett Seminary at Baylor University. Though Paul and I connected previously through social media, we met in person at a conference in June in Minneapolis and found out we have quite a bit in common, mainly our passion for Jesus and sports. If you're a Christian who likes sports, you'll especially enjoy this conversation. Earlier in 2023, Paul gave a chapel talk called "Jesus and James Naismith," where he explored the Christian roots of basketball. In our conversation this week, he shares a little bit about that history and the Christian origin of one of the world's most popular games. Even if you don't like sports, stick around for Paul discuss how he followed his passions to end up where he is now professionally as well as how he goes about his research and writing. Speaking of his writing, he's writing a book about the history of sports and Christianity in modern American culture, which should be published in late 2024 or early 2025. Paul is pretty active on Twitter, so give him a follow @p_emory, or on Threads @paulemoryputz. You can also email him at Paul_Putz@baylor.edu. I'd love for you to connect with me by signing up for my newsletter, "The Road Ahead": ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠coledouglasclaybourn.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. You can also find more of my articles and content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠coleclaybourn.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and on social media: Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@coleclaybourn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@ColeClaybourn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also find me on Facebook at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠facebook.com/ColeDouglasClaybourn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/in-no-hurry/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/in-no-hurry/support

The intersection of faith and sports is where Paul Putz's research and teaching resides. As Assistant Director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, he works with both current and future leaders in sports, and his research examines topics ranging from Christian sports organizations to social issues, sports and religion. In this Baylor Connections, Putz considers these topics and more, and shares how his work on James Naismith's faith led to a connection with the family of the inventor of basketball.

The Ride Home with John & Kathy! Buckle in for a Friday full! With.. Ascetic Superstars, Irish monks and Nuns are famous for their spiritual heroics ... GUEST Lisa M. Bitel ... Dean's Professor of Religion & Professor History, USC Basketball is a beautiful game, but not a blueprint for society (from CT) ... GUEST Paul Emory Putz ... assistant director of the Faith&Sports Institute at Baylor University Plus This or That, The Week in Review and More! It's all here on The Ride Home with John & Kathy. Have a great weekend!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Ride Home with John & Kathy! Buckle in for a Friday full! With.. Ascetic Superstars, Irish monks and Nuns are famous for their spiritual heroics ... GUEST Lisa M. Bitel ... Dean's Professor of Religion & Professor History, USC Basketball is a beautiful game, but not a blueprint for society (from CT) ... GUEST Paul Emory Putz ... assistant director of the Faith&Sports Institute at Baylor University Plus This or That, The Week in Review and More! It's all here on The Ride Home with John & Kathy. Have a great weekend!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scott hails from Northern Ireland where he started his career as an S&C coach with the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland. Having worked with multiple sports, he ultimately became Physical Preparation Lead for British Swimming. He oversaw significant transformation of several swimmers through to Rio 2016, including multiple Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth Games Champions who broke many world records along the way. Following the Rio Olympics Scott joined British Cycling as Head Strength and Conditioning Coach. He supported sprint and BMX programs and led a national team of S&C coaches supporting over 100 athletes. A year prior to Tokyo Scott was asked to become the coach for the Men's podium sprint squad, and they went on to medal in every possible event. Scott is currently a Senior Strength and Conditioning Coach with the Queensland Academy of Sport and National Technical Lead for Swimming Australia. He is completing a PhD in neuromuscular performance. QUOTES “As a strength and conditioning coach, you are vastly more effective if you understand what else is happening outside of the gym in an athlete's sport” “When you're coaching a program, what I learned to appreciate is that you don't always have athletes who are going to show up to training and attack every rep and set with maximal intent because you are not working with robots… so you have to pivot and tinker and adapt” "I think there are ways of reverse engineering performance in field sports but what you might not be able to see though is the same degree of quantifiable change in a gym variable resulting in a change in performance” “I would really love it if I could find a practical way in elite sport to do more job shares so everybody in a high performance team gets a better understanding of each other person's role” SHOWNOTES 1) A quick recap of Scott's career so far from Northern Ireland to the Queensland Academy of Sport 2) Being thrust into a technical coach role in a sport you have never coached or played before 3) Leading from the front, leading from the side and leading from behind with the British podium sprint cycling squad 4) The nuances of coaching athletes that are multiple Olympic and World Championship medalists. 5) Reverse engineering performance versus being reactive as a coach and the advantages of both 6) How you might reverse engineer performance in more open skill sports 7) The theory behind transcranial direct current stimulation 8) The “Roy Keane” moment for Scott and his current work with Australian swimming

Son of a pastor, college basketball player, PhD historian, and the assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Truett Seminary and Baylor University, Dr. Paul Putz has a lot to share. His research and writing has been featured at Christianity Today, Slate, National Public Radio, Religion News Service, and more. Paul is deep thinker and […]

This week Alex chats with Dr. Paul Putz, Assistant Director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor. They discuss the $1 billion ad campaign for Jesus, known as “He Gets Us.”DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the cast members and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Christ Community Church.TIMESTAMPS⏱️00:00 INTRO09:01 DR. PAUL PUTZ

The ride home with John & Kathy! Buckle in for a Thursday full! Like… A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers ... GUEST Dr Derek Schuurman, Professor of Computer Science, Calvin Univ Super Bowl Fans Don't Need a Linebacker Jesus: Using sports to market Christ has a long history, but Sunday's iteration might skip the muscles for heart ... GUEST Paul Emory Putz ... assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor Univ Hundreds of Ukrainian Churches Damaged by Russia: One out of three buildings tallied by Institute for Religious Freedom belong to evangelicals ... GUEST Meagan Saliashvili .. Religion reporter at Christianity Today and Religion News Service Plus Does This Make Sense? And more! Thanks for riding with us on The Ride Home with John & Kathy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The ride home with John & Kathy! Buckle in for a Thursday full! Like… A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers ... GUEST Dr Derek Schuurman, Professor of Computer Science, Calvin Univ Super Bowl Fans Don't Need a Linebacker Jesus: Using sports to market Christ has a long history, but Sunday's iteration might skip the muscles for heart ... GUEST Paul Emory Putz ... assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor Univ Hundreds of Ukrainian Churches Damaged by Russia: One out of three buildings tallied by Institute for Religious Freedom belong to evangelicals ... GUEST Meagan Saliashvili .. Religion reporter at Christianity Today and Religion News Service Plus Does This Make Sense? And more! Thanks for riding with us on The Ride Home with John & Kathy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cindy White serves as the Program Director at Baylor University/Truett Seminary's Faith and Sports Institute and is motivated to help young people aspire to true greatness in their sports and life. She also is an adjunct professor at Truett Seminary and facilitates ministry in Baylor Athletics. In addition, Cindy is co-leading the effort to expand Truett's Sports Ministry Program to online and modular education for practitioners in sports. Cindy grew up in Akron, Ohio, in a family of nine where she played volleyball, basketball, and softball competitively. She went on to earn All-American honors in volleyball and graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in Health, Physical Education, and Recreation with graduate studies in Exercise Physiology. Following a year of coaching at The University of Texas, Cindy received an M.A. from Moody Bible Institute in Biblical Studies and Ministry, which prompted her to pioneer the women's campus ministry with Athletes in Action, where she has served for 35 years. Baylor Seminary Certificate: https://www.baylor.edu/truett/index.php?id=963943 In this conversation with Chad, Cindy discusses: What every coach needs from their community How to avoid burnout Dealing with past, pain, and suffering _______________________________________________________________ Chad, Gian, and Jim were all sports coaches at all different levels and institutions. Now, they are joining forces to serve coaches through conversations so they can lead like Jesus. They will have conversations with influential Christian coaches who are making an impact in their teams and communities in the name of Christ. Listen to it on your favorite podcast player: https://plinkhq.com/i/1536134061?to=page Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/christcoachpod Follow us on IG: www.instagram.com/christcoachpod  

South Australia will be home to a world class high-performance sport, research, and education precinct thanks to a multi-million-dollar partnership between the South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) and UniSA. The State Government will contribute $68 million towards the development of a new state-of-the-art SASI facility at Mile End (in the International Sports Gateway precinct), with UniSA contributing a further $20 million for capital costs of the project. The investment brings together key pieces of sporting infrastructure and creates a hub that will support athletes to perform at their best and attract national and international teams to Adelaide in their preparations for the Olympics, Paralympics, and Commonwealth Games. The new facility will also provide improved opportunities for school students to visit, be inspired and boost participation in sport.The new SASI will be co-located at Mile End with the new National Centre for Sports Aerodynamics, the UniSA Sports Science Hub, SA Athletics Stadium and Netball SA Stadium, creating one of the best high-performance sports precincts right on the doorstep of Adelaide's CBD.In this segment, we hear from Wes Battams – Director, South Australian Sports Institute and Professor Jon Buckley – Dean of Human Performance Programs at UniSA on the new partnership. 

Movies! ... GUEST Alissa Wilkinson … is a film, culture and food writer … she's currently the senior culture reporter at Vox.com, as well as an associate professor at The King's College … she was a writing fellow at the Sundance Institute's Art of NonFiction project and has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic,  & The Washington Post … she lives in Brooklyn w her husband.   Gardening (what Doug's seeing in Baltimore's gardening trade show … + … organizing/testing old seeds … + …  when to start fertilizing houseplants … + … care of indoor plants … + … planning this year's garden) … GUEST Doug Oster ... Editor of Gardening with Doug at dougoster.com.   FOBO: Gen Z's FOMO - Guest:  Jerry Riendeau.   After Answered Prayers for Damar Hamlin, What's Next? The faith intertwined with American football may also call us to care better for the players whose bodies bear the brunt of the sport (from CT) … GUEST Paul Emory Putz … assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor Univ.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Movies! ... GUEST Alissa Wilkinson … is a film, culture and food writer … she's currently the senior culture reporter at Vox.com, as well as an associate professor at The King's College … she was a writing fellow at the Sundance Institute's Art of NonFiction project and has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic,  & The Washington Post … she lives in Brooklyn w her husband.   Gardening (what Doug's seeing in Baltimore's gardening trade show … + … organizing/testing old seeds … + …  when to start fertilizing houseplants … + … care of indoor plants … + … planning this year's garden) … GUEST Doug Oster ... Editor of Gardening with Doug at dougoster.com.   FOBO: Gen Z's FOMO - Guest:  Jerry Riendeau.   After Answered Prayers for Damar Hamlin, What's Next? The faith intertwined with American football may also call us to care better for the players whose bodies bear the brunt of the sport (from CT) … GUEST Paul Emory Putz … assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor Univ.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since starting my work at Baylor I've had the opportunity to get to know Paul Putz and his work with the Faith and Sports Institute, and he is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter @p_emory. This is just a continuation of conversations we've had about youth sports in particular. Keep an eye out for his book coming in 2023. Paul Putz serves as Assistant Director of the Faith & Sports Institute, where he helps to lead and develop online programming and curriculum as well as assisting with communications and strategic planning. Paul received his bachelor's degree in secondary education from Grace University, where he played basketball. He went on to get a PhD in history from Baylor. He has over a decade of experience as an educator in the high school and college classroom and his research and writing has been featured at Christianity Today, Slate, National Public Radio, Religion News Service, and more. His first book, which explores the history of sports and Christianity in modern American culture, is under contract with Oxford University Press.  

* Parents ask that the school year end remotely due to Covid cases Parents are going to propose to educational authorities that they close the school year remotely due to the rise in Covid cases *Airbnb definitely prohibits parties With this measure, the platform will prevent accommodation from hosting clandestine parties. *Sports Institute consolidates actions for the benefit of Solidarenses Playa del Carmen, Municipality of Solidaridad, June 28.- In order to continue the sports actions undertaken by the government led by Lili Campos, for the benefit of the youth of Solidarity athletes, highlighted the growth of local sports in various disciplines, as well as the opening of more spaces, which in past years were restricted and conditioned with an economic payment. * They seek to ban thongs on clotheslines in Quintana Roo; A group of religious women is seeking a ban on the display of thongs on clotheslines in Quintana Roo, because they are tired of infidelity. 29.6.22 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cjr-news/support

If there's a sports-loving person in your family that dreams of representing Australia at the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games - the South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) is conducting generic fitness, and sport specific (for cycling, rowing, canoe sprint and beach volleyball), testing sessions with secondary school aged students.Listen in as Simon Cain (SASI Manager, Sports and Programs) describes who they're looking for and how you can get involved, and SASI cycling athlete Sarah Dally talks about her experience having being part of a previous talent search.With the Brisbane Olympics just 10 years away, the process of identifying and developing talented athletes is now. Talent Search testing sessions will take place at multiple locations in both metropolitan and regional areas during the July and October school holidays. Registrations for Talent Search sessions are essential – register via www.sasi.sa.gov.au 

Jacob Jungell got master's degree of Exercise Physiology in Univeristy of Jyväskylä. He has then worked as Project Worker and Lecturer in Arcada Univeristy of Applied Sciences, in Helsinki Finland. Currently he is working as a Teacher in Solvalla Sports Insitute and as Performance Coach in Hintsa Performance. ------------------------------------ This podcast episode is sponsored by Fibion Inc. | The New Gold Standard for Sedentary Behaviour and Physical Activity Monitoring Learn more about Fibion: fibion.com/research --- Collect, store and manage SB and PA data easily and remotely - Discover new Fibion SENS Motion: https://sens.fibion.com/

This week's guest on the Pacey Performance Podcast is sprint coach Steve Fudge. Steve is the head coach at his own FudgeLdnProject, having guided several British sprinters to sub 10 and sub-20-second performances and a haul of 18 international medals, including with Jonnie Peacock. Steve started out as an intern at the University of Washington in Seattle, followed by the Sports Institute in Brisbane and Queensland Sports Institute in Adelaide. Steve is here to talk about what he knows best – the principles of sprint training. He discusses posture, what to look for as a beginner and how to use it to build acceleration. There's insight into Steve's day-to-day drills and exercise selection, including the ones he is starting to move away from too. For non-sprint-based sports, such as in rugby or football, Steve also gives us his advice on how to coach sprints and acceleration in a team environment. This includes his tips for coaching larger groups of up to 25 athletes and knowing the cues to look for in their exercise selection. Additionally, there's a section on why speed coaches can also be considered people coaches, and why they could be said to “talk too much”. For all this and much more, hit the play button now. This week's topics: How Steve started as an intern in the US and Australia The principles of sprint training Posture, and how to use it when improving acceleration Assistance training and the use of sleds Steve's day-to-day drills and exercise selection for posture The drills that Steve is moving away from Sprint training for football, rugby and other non-sprint-based sports Steve's tips for coaching larger groups of 20 or more athletes Why can sprint coaches can “talk too much”

Cindy White & Paul Putz from Truett Seminary's Faith and Sports Institute 03-24-2022

Huge episode today, i was so lucky enough to have Loris Bertolacci on as a guest. Loris has a massive resume that simply does not fit into this description. He has coached across four decades with multiple AFL clubs, Olympic level athletes and squads including the Australian women's volleyball team and currently works as a Strength and Conditioning coach with the Shanghai institute of sport. Loris was also quite that athlete in his early days having competed internationally in Hammer throw. If you are a strength and conditioning coach working in the field currently and trying to develop or improve your program. Loris has been there and done it. He offers so much insight and wisdom on what works and what doesn't as well as what is most important when training athletes. Find Loris at: IG @@Loris Bertolacci Linkedin @Loris Bertolacci Instagram and twitter @loris.bertolacci Podbean https://lorisbertolacci.podbean.com/ Thanks for listening to the episode. Find myself at: IG:@m.cope.fitness Website: www.marcuscopefitness.net Facebook:Marcus Cope Fitness Linkedln: Marcus Cope Youtube Channel: Marcus Cope Fitness

- Aaron Rodgers Cleanse - Requesting Photos - SA Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. Christian Balldin of the Sports Institute at TSAOG & more

Brian Flores suing the NFL - Troy Aikman joins, Spurs take on the shorthanded Warriors, and the San Antonio Sports Star Injury Update with Dr. Eloy Ochoa from the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Paul Putz, Assistant Director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University, about  the intersections of Race, Faith, and Sport.   If you like what you heard from this episode, please leave a comment, five stars, and support us via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=62012735

- SA Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. Josh Bell of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics - Cowboys and Dak's slump...Jerry said he was in one - Spurs trade rumors...what would you be willing to part with for whom?

- SA Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. Casey Taber of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics - (25:26) College Football Playoff Rankings revealed

- UTSA comes in at 22 in latest College Football Playoff rankings, and what it means for the Roadrunners - (23:25) Game Night San Antonio: Tom Orsborn of the San Antonio Express-News joins to preview Spurs-Clippers - (38:24) Dr. Lane Naugher joins for the SA Sports Star Injury Update powered by the Sports Institute at TSAOG

- SA Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. David Espinoza of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics, Trying to figure out what went wrong against Denver for the Dallas Cowboys - (26:55) Aaron Rodgers apologizes...kinda

Kenneth L. Shropshire is an African-American author, attorney, consultant, educator, CEO of the Global Sport Institute and ADIDAS Distinguished Professor of Global Sport at Arizona State University (ASU). On this episode we speak with Kenneth Hall of Fame alumni of Dorsey High school in Southern California. Education is a foundation for Ken playing Center and as well as Linebacker at Stanford where his Coach helped him understand the important in a way only a football coach can do! So much historical context and early experience with racial climate, no black coaches on the Stanford football team & they just completed the Cardinals name change letting go of the Indiana's affiliation. Ken was able to use his economic and lawyer background to go on and help so many athletes. One in particular Ray Anderson, former teammate now AD of ASU. After helping Ray negotiated his deal, Ken was presented with an offer they wouldn't let him refuse. We also discuss The Future of Africans Americans in MLB and women in college basketball. Talked about the great work the Adidas Global Sports Institute is doing. Tap into this one!For more with Kenneth L. Shropshire:https://www.kennethshropshire.com More on Global Sports ASU follow @GlobalSportASU For more Black in Sports additional content on our podcast see linktree: https://linktr.ee/blackinsports |Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/blackinsports | YouTube - @blackinsports | Instagram - @blackinsports | Twitter - @blackinsports | Website - https://www.blackinsports.com/ | Thank you & we appreciate you! #awardwinningpodcast #bestsportspodcast #blackpodwinner#fortheculture #blackinsports #sportsbusiness #podcast #tellingblackstories #blackowner #Blackeffect #sportsbiz #BlackPlayersForChange #sportsnews #blackowned #blackmedia #HBCULeaguePass #blackpodcastmatter #globalsports #Adidas

- Spurs vs Lakers, should LeBron play, what to make of the Spurs so far this season, what about the Lakers struggles & more - (21:31) Charean Williams: Covers the NFL and the Dallas Cowboys for Pro Football Talk - (33:26) SA Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. Josh Bell of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics

- San Antonio Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. David Espinoza of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics - (22:21) Pete Thamel: Yahoo Sports College sports writer on UTSA's invitation to the American Athletic Conference and what it means

- Luke waived, Pop speaks - (8:09) SA Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr Casey Taber of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (32:13) Charean Williams: NFL writer for Pro Football Talk and Peacock on the John Gruden Situation & the Dallas Cowboys

- San Antonio Sports Star Injury Update w/ Dr. Eloy Ochoa of the Sports Institute at The Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics - (19:34) Spurs win big, Josh Primo goes off in 2nd half, does that change expectations for him? - (33:16) San Antonio Community College Paper the Ranger is closing after nearly 100 years

Episode 87: Andy McDonald chats to Matt Jordan the Director of Sports Science at the Canadian Sports Institute Calgary, an S&C Coach, Consultant and Educator. Over his career, Matt was the personal strength coach to 30 World and Olympic medalists, and has worked with elite athletes in many sports including speed skating, cross country skiing, alpine skiing, snowboarding, biathlon, hockey, football, volleyball and mixed martial arts. In this episode Andy & Matt discuss force velocity profiling, program design and considerations for changing injured athletes movement patterns.      Topics Discussed:    Force Velocity - The ideal slope / curve for an athlete Cross-comparing kinematics / technique against kinetics and output Identifying human factors during testing Identifying & influencing internal constraints in post-injury movement patterns.   Where you can find Matt:   Website Facebook Twitter     25% JordanStrength.com course code discount for Inform Performance Listeners: INFORMPOD2021     Sponsor Inform Performance is sponsored by VALD Performance, makers of the Nordbord, Forceframe, ForeDecks and HumanTrak. VALD Performance systems are built with the high-performance practitioner in mind, translating traditionally lab-based technologies into engaging, quick, easy-to-use tools for daily testing, monitoring and training     Keep up to date with everything that is going on with the podcast by following Inform Performance on:   Instagram Twitter Our Website   Our Team   Dr Andy McDonald Ben Ashworth Alistair McKenzie

After one vault on Tuesday, Simone Biles took herself out of the US gymnastics women's team competition. A day later, she withdrew from the all-around, “in order to focus on her mental health,” read a statement on the USA Gymnastics' Twitter account. Simone also blamed the twisties, where, as the Washington Post describes, athletes “lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air. Sometimes they twist when they hadn't planned to. Other times they stop midway through, as Biles did. And after experiencing the twisties once, it's very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.” While the majority of fans have reacted to Biles' departure from these marquee competitions with support, it did draw scorn from some, who see her decision not to compete as quitting or a cop out. As with everything else these days, Biles' decision became part of the culture wars. And no doubt her decision will make its way into countless sermon illustrations this weekend. This week on the show, we wanted to talk about how our discussion of elite athletics shapes the way we think about Christian discipleship. And when we hear words like sacrifice and redemption in our culture, it's most often in a sports context. How is that shaping the way the church is talking about those words? Brian Gamel is a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor University's Faith and Sports Institute, where he is writing a book on athletic imagery in the New Testament. He also wrote a piece for Christian Scholar's Review earlier this year called “‘Whoever Wishes to Become Great' – Sports, Glory, and the Gospel.” Tim Dalrymple is the CEO and editor in chief of Christianity Today. He is also a former elite gymnast: When he was a sophomore at Stanford, he was the NCAA's top-ranked gymnast and a likely Olympics contender, until an accident on the high bar broke his neck and ended his athletic career. Gamel and Dalrymple joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss Paul's athletic metaphors, a biblical theology of the body and sport, and what it means to actually support athletes in your church.What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow Tim Dalrymple on Twitter Email our guest: Brian_Gamel@baylor.edu Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Thomas DeBerardino of the Sports Institute at TSAOG, Thoughts on Cowboys Camp practice - (32:00) Training Camp shenanigan's - (37:41) Hotel Hijinks

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Josh Bell of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (24:08) Q: Raider Nation Radio 720 AM in Las Vegas - (36:48) NBA Finals will the Suns force a game 7

- Team USA drops 2nd straight exhibition game - (12:26) Phil Steele: Author of the Phil Steel College Football Preview Magazine - (33:05) ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr Brad Tolin of the Sports Institute at TSAOG

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Casey Taber of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics - (12:39) Name Image and Likeness taking off in college sports already - (22:14) AT&T Center name change coming soon, but what will it be? - (30:56) NBA Finals game 1

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Eloy Ochoa of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (14:24) New ESPN Mock has Spurs taking former Duke Forward Jalen Johnson - (27:53) Trae Young ruled out for game 4, how will the Hawks respond?

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Lane Naugher of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (8:55) Bruce Bowen: Former San Antonio Spur, ESPN NBA Analyst, and TMI Head Basketball Coach joins to talk Ben Simmons rumors, NBA playoffs and more

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr David Espinoza of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (10:29) MLB Foreign substances crackdown

Steve Hess:  After 21 years as Director of Performance with the Denver Nuggets, Steve Hess is now the Chief Performance Officer for Panorama Orthopedic and Spine and Operating Owner for Panorama Wellness and Sports Institute.  Among his many awards, Steve was nominated as “Citizen of the Year” by the Douglas County Sheriffs Dept. for his work with deputies, sheriffs and [...] The post Live on the Radio June 13th first appeared on NO COPAY RADIO.

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr Thomas DeBerardino of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (15:53) NBA Playoffs ramp up, Brooklyn and Phoenix roll, what to expect tonight from Hawks @ Philly and Utah vs Clippers - (20:49) Dan Ahdoot and Bret Ernst of Cobra Kia join the show - (32:05) Looking at tonight's playoff games, Philadelphia vs Atlanta & Utah vs LA Clippers

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr Eloy Ochoa of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (11:25) Naomi Osaka and the media coverage responsibilities of athletes - (25:46) NBA Playoffs coming down to some very important games in this first round including two games tonight that at tied at 2 games apiece - (38:11) First player you think of

In this episode, Angela talks with Sushama Austin-Connor about her research on joy and her book The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found. They consider how we can study joy with a theological lens, how our emotions are always teaching us something, and how joy is a realization of relatedness and connection. Dr. Angela Williams Gorrell is an ordained pastor and assistant professor of practical theology at Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary. Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor, she was an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, working on the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, and a lecturer in Divinity and Humanities at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She received both her Ph.D. in Practical Theology and MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary, and her BA in Youth Ministry at Azusa Pacific University. She is the author of a new book, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found, which shares findings of the joy project while addressing America's opioid and suicide crises. Intro (00:01): What is joy? What is the difference between joy and happiness? What's the relationship between despair and joy? Angela Williams Gorrell has been exploring these questions. Angela is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary and an ordained pastor in the Mennonite Church USA. In this episode. Sushama Austin-Connor talks with Angela about her work recently published in the book entitled, "The Gravity of Joy: The Story of Being Lost and Found". Together, they explore what it means to study joy with a theological lens and how joy can be sustained alongside sorrow. [light percussion music and the sound of a water droplet] You are listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.  Sushama (00:50): I was very interested in learning more stories and illustrations from your childhood and your background. Can you give us even a more full idea of your background and your childhood in life leading up to your academic career? Angela (01:04): Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me today. It's great to be talking with you. I grew up in Eastern Kentucky in Appalachia, in a little town called Pikeville, and it might -- actually in Appalachia though, like, it could be called a big town. [laughter] But I grew up there, spent the first seven and a half years of my life there and really grew up in church, went to church the first Sunday after I was born, as my parents like to tell the story. They like literally, you know -- back then, babies, they just, they didn't worry about them, you know, catching anything. I don't think [laughter]. Sushama (01:39): That's right. [laughter] Angela (01:39): They're like, "Hey, you were born three days ago, we're taking you to church and passing it around to everybody." [laughter] So that's me, and I've been going to church my entire life. The church has really been a sanctuary to me, a safe haven, which I know it hasn't been that way... I mean, and not, and not in every respect. And certainly there's been a lot of hard moments, being a part of Christian communities, but in many respects, I'm very grateful to say, especially youth group, I think was a really powerful safe haven for me and my life. But, anyhow, my parents got divorced when I was seven and a half, and that meant that my mom decided to move us to Lexington, which is in central Kentucky. And I, you know, I'm really grateful that that happened because of some opportunities that I got in Lexington. Mostly two things that I think are important for people to know about me. One is that I've been writing since I was like -- could write. Like basically when I could write things, I began to tell stories and to write poetry. And so it's interesting to look back at like my second-grade self and the kinds of poems that I wrote. But I've always been an observer of life, like someone who deeply... Like my friends like to say "Angela lives in the deep end of life." [laughter] Angela (02:56): So, yeah! So I, when I got to Lexington, one thing that was really important was that I got to attend The School for the Creative and Performing Arts. So, from fourth to eighth grade, every single day for two hours a day, I wrote, which many children can not say that. But, we all have -- we had to all different majors at our school. So some people did arts -- like did art for a couple hours. Some people did dance, singing, you know, violin, piano, whatever. But for me, it was creative writing. And so that was very formative for me and important. And then the second thing that happened was that I got a special speech pathologist to help me because, as I described in The Gravity of Joy, that I was born deaf. And so for several years, basically until I was in sixth grade, I had a really hard time communicating with other people. Unless you knew me really well, it was difficult to understand me because I had a really significant speech impediment. And so it actually made it hard to make friends in elementary school and to be myself, 'cause I constantly was fighting for my words, which is interesting because... I say that to say -- today too, that the two things that I am most known for other than teaching are writing and speaking, and until I was in middle school, I couldn't be understood by people very well. So, but in Lexington, you know, I had this, like this special speech pathologist who really invested in my life -- for three years, every week -- and then went to the school that was very formative and important for me. After high school, I went to school to become a youth minister. So I, you know, I went to school, college, I got my bachelor of arts is in youth ministry from Azusa Pacific University in Los Angeles, lived in LA for 13 years. And the whole time I was living in Los Angeles, I kind of... I kept one foot in the church. I was always in ministry, mostly in youth ministry, but on a lot of preaching teams as well and doing family ministry of course, and then one foot in the academy. So I was kind of like always getting a degree, but also hanging out in the church. And for me as a practical theologian, that's super important because it was like, you know, I would be in the church. I would be among Christians in community. And I would be seeing the sorts of things that were keeping people awake at night. And then I'd be like, okay, as a researcher, as you know, I'm a Ph.D. student, for example, I want to think more about that in relationship to their faith. But then as I was, you know -- when you're in the academy, when you're getting degrees and you're reading books, like you're like, okay, but what's going on in people's real lives? Sushama (05:31): Right, right. Angela (05:32): Like, how did this relate to people's everyday experiences? And so, for me as a practical theologian, it was very important to kind of always be in ministry and -- while learning in the academy. And I still to this day try to be a very grounded theologian. So while I was finishing up my PhD in Los Angeles is when I got an email about a job at Yale University, working at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. And I received that job in March of 20-- I accepted that job, excuse me, in March of 2016 and ended up moving to Connecticut. And that's how I'm... yeah. So I went from Kentucky to Los Angeles to Connecticut, and then I worked on the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project. That's what I was recruited to Yale to be on that research team. And then, after the project ended, I applied for this job that I currently have at Baylor University. And so I moved to Waco, Texas in fall 2019 to become a professor of practical theology at Baylor University's Truett Seminary. Sushama (06:33): That's great. That's great. I wanted to jump right into the Life Worth Living course, but before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about what you mentioned about keeping one foot in the church and one foot in the academy. Because I know in our work in continuing education, where this podcast series is housed, that's kind of our work. That's what we hope we're doing well. So what do you feel that doing your work in both of those spheres, what does it offer to you when you're out and about talking to pastors and their congregations or to pastors and lay leadership? Angela (07:13): I think that, you know, for -- like, people ask me, you know, what are you an expert in, Angela? Like, what do you research? And, certainly I can say a few things that I think that over the years I've become more adept at talking about, like the ability to help people like make sense of like, like the meaning and purpose in their lives, joy, new media. Those are some of the things I've focused on a lot. But in general, I tell people that I feel called to research the things that matter to people and to shine the light of the gospel on them. And I think that as I hold both the experiences that I have in Christian communities and the research that I do together, like, the more that I hold those together, I think the more that pastors feel like, you know, "Yeah, Angela, the things that you're doing and talking about, they do relate to our congregants lives. They do relate to everyday Christians lives." And I think that there's something that feels to then pastors, like, very honest about it. Where they're like, "Okay, you're a theologian who does care about what's happening in people's lives every day. That's good." Sushama (08:22): Talk to me about the Life Worth Living course at Yale, because, in doing the research, I realized that it has a profound impact on people and is really well known. Yes. I would love to hear more about what that course is and what it entailed and how you got to be a part of that. Angela (08:39): Yeah. So, seven years ago, Miroslav Volf -- and that's whose research team that I was on and anybody who, you know, most people are familiar with -- if they know about Miroslav's work, they know about his very, very famous book *Exclusion and Embrace*, and he is just an extraordinary systematic theologian and person. And I'm very grateful that I had the privilege and the honor of being on his research team for the Theology of Joy the Good Life Project. Seven years ago, Miroslav and my colleague, our colleague, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, who still works at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, they read two books that were really pivotal to them. For them. One was "Education's End" by Anthony Kronman and another book is called "College: What It Was, What It Is, and What It Should Be". And both of these books argue that the meaning of life used to be central to the college experience, that the search, the examination of, and the articulation of meaning and purpose used to be not just a part of the college experience, but actually like fundamental to it. Angela (09:52): And so they wondered what would it look like to bring the meaning of life back to the classroom. So they created a course called Life Worth Living, and they pitched it to the humanities department. I mean, they're housed at the divinity school and Miroslav is a professor at the divinity school, but they wanted to do it with Yale undergraduates. So they reached out to the humanities department there. They said, sure, you can have 14 students for a semester and do Life Worth Living. And that's what they wanted. And then 60 students signed up for the class, and then every semester, no matter how many times, no matter how many sections of the course that we offered -- because we always want to keep it small, like 14 to 17 students, because it's a conversation, it's a dialogue; it's about helping young people to grow inarticulacy about the good life, the flourishing life. So we can't help them develop articulacy if they're not actually talking. So we want it to keep it small, but no matter how many sections we offer at Yale, every spring, we have way more students than we can accept. So the last time I taught it was spring of 2019, and I think we had 75 spots and about 235 students apply and they all wrote essays to get into the class. Sushama (11:08): Incredible. Angela (11:08): Pretty extraordinary. Yeah. And so what, we've -- what we're finding... And then the more that we tell people about this program... I've taught it in a prison with my colleague, Matt Crossman, who's the Director of Life Worth Living at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. We have taught, done weekend retreats with people who are on the brink of retirement, weekend retreats with people who are in business and, you know, corporate leaders who just want to have this conversation. There are people who are doing this in all different types of settings, in high school settings, you know, those sorts of things. And so we're actually trying to figure out more how we can spread, like, basically our methodology to more and more people. And right now I've actually been training chaplains in the US army at multiple bases, all over the country in how to help soldiers articulate meaning and purpose. And so it's been really exciting. And then at Baylor, I teach a class on Mondays at Baylor called Jesus and the Meaning of Life. And in this class we are -- so whereas Life Worth Living in... Like when I'm training chaplains or when we're doing it in a prison or at Yale, we do it in a pluralistic way. You know, it's very, we look at how different people... So Life Worth Living has these key questions. Sushama (12:20): Mm hmm. Angela (12:22): What does it mean for life to go well? What should we hope for? What does it mean for life to feel well or to feel right? What does it mean for life to be led well? How should we live? What is the role of suffering in a good life and how should we respond to suffering? And what happens when we fail to live the life that we have that we hope for? And so those are the key questions. And when we ask them in a pluralistic setting, we look at how different people have answered these questions from religious and philosophical traditions throughout history. When I do it at Baylor on Monday afternoons, right now, we are thinking about these key questions in light of the life and teachings of Jesus specifically, and really at Baylor, in this class, we are looking at contested Christian visions of flourishing life, which I feel like has been, I mean, I think if you look over the last few years in the United States, we have contending visions of what it means to follow Jesus. And so on Monday afternoons at Baylor University, we are debating those visions. Sushama (13:35): Yeah. I feel like it's just an amazing career when you can study joy. That even the ability to study joy feels like it would be inherently a part of a good life for a scholar. Like, how do you study joy? What, what is the process for studying joy? Why joy? Angela (13:54): Joy is actually one of the most under- -- or before the joy project -- it was one of the most under-explored, positive emotions across multiple disciplines, actually. And many people conflate joy and happiness. And we wanted to try to understand the difference between the two as well. From a theological perspective, people like, for example, Thomas Aquinas say that joy is the culmination of all positive emotions, like, that sort of every positive emotion culminates in joy, it's the ultimate positive feeling. And so we wanted to explore what is joy from a theological perspective? What does it take to cultivate joy? What is the difference between joy and happiness? Why is joy important in our lives? If so, why, what does it do for human beings? And so we actually brought together 239 scholars from over 140 institutions on, I think, four continents and multiple countries from all different kinds of disciplines. Angela (15:02): We had psychologists, philosophers, literature professors, historians, all different kinds of professors come together and researchers and... Every consultation had a theme related to, so, you know, maybe the theme was, like, joy versus fear. And then people would submit papers from their academic discipline, like their perspective. And we had emerging scholars and senior scholars and we would read papers and we would debate. And then we would distill big ideas into bite-size pieces. And a lot of things were written over the last few years about joy. Many books were written, a lot of articles were submitted to journals. A lot of popular articles were submitted by scholars. And so we're really grateful and excited that over the last few years, there's been a lot more written and thought about in relation to joy that I think is going to be really helpful to people. Sushama (16:03): Why is it understudied? Why do you think that was? Angela (16:08): I don't know. It's a great question. I... my hunch is that it was so associated with happiness because happiness is not an underexplored phenomenon. Sushama (16:19): No, it's not. Yeah. Angela (16:20): Positive psychologists have contributed, have dedicated a lot of time to happiness over the last probably 20 years or so. And so positive psychology is such an interesting movement because for many years, psychologists studied and focused on pathology and how do we, you know, reduce depression? How do we reduce mental distress of all sorts? Um, how do we treat mental illness? Whereas positive psychology came along and they said, instead of focusing on pathology, like what if we focused on how do we nurture positive emotions and virtues in people's lives? So what if we focused on how do we cultivate happiness, for example? And so I just wonder if maybe the study of happiness... Sort of, like, people just assumed when they were studying happiness, that they were studying joy. Sushama (17:11): I mean, this seems like a good place to maybe give your definitions and ideas about the difference. So like what, what is joy versus happiness and how do they relate? Angela (17:23): Yeah, I think for me personally, like from a theological perspective, when you look at happiness and I think that Adam Potkay's book, *The Story of Joy* is very helpful for understanding the etymology of joy. So how did it come to be -- and happiness -- and like, what did they mean when people began to use these words? Joy is actually a much older word than happiness... In like, so it was used much more. But it really, and it really is a biblical word. It's actually, like, throughout the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament, joy is used quite frequently. And so Potkay talks a lot about that, but basically happiness became very popular in the 1800s, I believe, is when he was talking about it, as a way, a calculus of material conditions. So, generally happiness from my perspective is associated with people's sense that their lives are going well. Angela (18:23): People assess the circumstances or the conditions of their lives and they sit back and they think, yeah, my life is going well, I'm happy. I'm happy in this moment with the circumstances that I'm in, and I'm content with how my life is going. Whereas joy is a much more profound emotion and it is... and it, and it actually occurs less frequently,I think. I think happiness is easier to access for people than joy. But joy is -- so one thing about joy is that it's very modifiable in a way that few positive emotions are, I think, which makes it a strange emotion in the sense that joy... There is, there can be exuberant joy. And I think when we think about joy, most people associate it with like exuberant joy, like, oh my goodness. Sushama (19:12): Sure, yeah. Angela (19:12): So like, this is amazing. This is so great. Right. But joy, there's also quiet joy, sobering joy, healing joy, restorative, redemptive, joy. And actually from a theological perspective, I think that theologians and also in the, in the scriptures, what we see is that joy tends to be more like... For me, Luke 15 is the biblical ode to joy where... In Luke 15, what we see is the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. And so what's lost is found. And so there's the sense that joy is often the result, the feeling of, like, reunion, of restoration, of redemption, of what is lost being found. And so in order to feel joy sometimes, I mean that kind of joy, I mean, you have to have lost something. So there seems to be for me... And what I explore a lot in *The Gravity of Joy* is that joy has this mysterious capacity to be held alongside of sorrow. Joy can sustain us and can be sustained even in suffering... Which I think is very helpful to all of us. And like, sort of in the moment that we're finding ourselves in. Sushama (20:34): [inaudible]. Yeah, yeah. This moment. And then just, the moments that you described in your book, too. Reading, especially the depth of the chapter about your father's dying. I was... I have to say I was really affected. I actually re-read a little last night of that particular part. Because it's, it's so clear. You almost feel as a reader that you're there, too. I have to admit I was teary. And it occurred to me, I remembered about, maybe longer than a decade ago, a student at Harvard Divinity School telling me that she had just gone through, like, a season of death and grief. She called it a season of death and grief. And she did like a, almost like a mini sermon about it for an introduction to a forum we were doing. And I'll never forget how she described that. But when I read yours, I thought this is a season of death and grief. And the implications of that, that you found in your work in joy and how much it mattered in your work in joy. So I wonder if you would give us some sense of what was happening for you in holding all of these things and holding all of these moments in this season of death and in grief for you. Angela (21:49): Yeah. Thank you so much for what you said about the chapter, about my dad's death. Sushama (21:53): Yeah. Angela (21:53): I think for me, it was very important in this book to honor the journey of grief, and to speak about it, to write about it very honestly and openly. I... And because I think I wanted to really -- and I do spend a good deal of time in chapter four, talking about how grief not only produces tears, but anger and fear, and that those are stages of grief that are really important, I think, for people to talk about. I think a lot of times people experience profound grief and then find themselves really angry like I was. And they don't, they haven't been told that the two are associated. And so then they feel a little bit like, "What's happening to me?" Like, "Why am I so like... Why am I waking up so mad every day?" But when you've experienced significant loss, especially sudden loss, or, for me in the case of my dad, you know, losing him after nearly 12 years of opioid use, there was so much anger about not just his death, obviously, but all of the years that were lost before that, like the death of the guy that I knew long before he actually died. And so for me, I wanted to describe in this book, I mean, it's called "The Gravity of Joy" for a reason. Sushama (23:22): Yeah. Angela (23:22): Because it is about the weightiness of joy. It is about the kind of joy that I found in the midst of suffering was more of what Alexander Schmemann, the priest, calls 'a bright sorrow' in one of his journals. He describes joy as 'a bright sorrow' in the sense that to give ourselves over to joy is to always, in any moment that we do that to allow for just a few minutes, the brokenness, the loss, the sadness, the sin of the world, to hang in the background and instead to focus on what is good, what the relationship we have with other people, what is meaningful, you know, and to give ourselves over to just that goodness for a moment, and to allow that -- the darkness to hang in the background, the loss, you know? And so, yeah, that's what I'm doing in this book, as I think I'm trying to describe what it was to hold both sorrow and joy together in my own soul. Sushama (24:24): Yeah. And in doing that, the fact that these deaths came pretty much one after another, did you try to pivot to joy? Or do you feel like joy is inherent in the grieving -- so you like have ebbs and flows of joy -- or are you thinking to yourself, you know what, this person had a wonderful life. I remember these memories with them. That makes me joyful. Like, I'm going to concentrate on the joy in this moment of this person's life. Angela (24:51): Not during those four weeks, not a year and a half after. No. Joy did not -- no. I think that it was not for about a year and a half that I really could allow joy in. I think that joy is a gift. I don't think we can manufacture the feeling of joy. I think that it finds us and then we open ourselves up to it. Or, you know, I think we can be postured for joy. We can get ready for joy. And then when it makes its way to us, we can give ourselves over to it. But yeah, even for that year and a half, I wasn't, I wouldn't say that I was someone who was postured for joy. I wasn't looking for joy. I was able, after I got into writing the book, to look at the weeks that -- those four weeks when I lost three people back to back in very sudden and very tragic ways each in their own, you know, suicide, senseless death of a young person, and then opioid use, like I was able to look back and to see a moment in each, after each person's death, when I experienced a kind of sobering, quiet joy or a healing joy. You know, I experienced some joy in thinking about them and what they meant to me. Sushama (25:56): Sure. Angela (25:57): And like, in moments that, like, God met me and my family in the midst of what was happening, which is what brought joy. Because I say in the book too, that joy is the very being and presence of God, ministering to you. And so I was able in, very much in hindsight to see where God was and that brought me joy, but like, I would not describe those four weeks as joyful whatsoever. And I also would say that it took me a good year and a half to actually start to write about joy. Again, like I had written, I was writing about it a lot, reading everything I could get my hands on in the first eight months, even outside of the consultations we were doing. And then it was just hard to go to work. And I lived in the fog of grief and then I became this chaplain at a maximum-security prison for women on suicide watch. Angela (26:47): And that's when -- and then, so I become this chaplain. I decided to volunteer, which was such a strange thing to surrender to because I was at the end of myself, I did not think that I had anything to offer anyone. And yet I felt the tug of the Spirit in church one night when they were asking for more volunteers and I just decided to do it. And then a few weeks into it, I realized I'd been assigned the building, like, with women on suicide watch. I realized that the overwhelming majority of women in my Bible study were in prison for heroin or crack. And then I realized that... So basically my, like my study of joy, my family suffering, and the suffering of these incarcerated women collided in that prison. And I began to wonder, like, what could our research on joy and visions of the good life and contemporary culture, like what might it say to my family suffering, to these women's suffering, to America's crises of despair, both suicide and death by opioids have been called deaths of despair. So I began to wonder like, what's going on in the larger picture of what's happening in America today? You know what I mean? And then finally I'll say that my friend, Willie James Jennings, who was a colleague of mine at Yale Divinity School, he gave this lecture about a month and a half after I started being a chaplain at the prison on joy. And he said two things that absolutely changed my life in this lecture. One was that he said, we can make our pain productive without glorifying or justifying suffering. And that, because that was the last thing I wanted to do. I did not want to write about my family suffering as some sort of like way of saying that like, God had this happened, that I could write a book about joy amid suffering. Angela (28:38): You know, I don't, I don't claim that to this day. I don't think that God does stuff like that in our lives. I don't make sense of my family suffering in that way. And so this book is not an attempt to justify or to glorify what happened to my family or to the women that I met in prison. It is an attempt simply to make pain productive, to say that, you know, I can take what I went through, what these women have gone through are still going through. And I can try to be a part of the groundswell of people who are addressing America's crisis of despair. Like, you know, and then the second thing he said was joy is a work of resistance against despair. Like, he channeled Habakkuk 3 and he was just like, you know, this is, this joy is a work of resistance against despair. And so as I, you know, it like all came together in this moment, in this lecture where I was like, oh wow, we have a crisis of despair in American culture. My family has experienced it. I'm meeting with women every Wednesday who experienced this. And then joy is a work of resistance against despair. I'm writing about that. And that is what *The Gravity of Joy* is, that is the thesis of this book. That joy is a counter agent to despair. Interlude (29:56): [sound of water droplet] Sushama (29:58): You talk about this counter agency of despair. Give more illustrations of how that joy, like if it's from the women's prison or in your own life, but how is it that joy might serve as this great counter agent to despair? Angela (30:12): Well, if despair is the feeling that many people I think have... When I think about despair, I describe it as a theologian. So that's important. I'm not a psychologist. You know, I keep saying that throughout the thing, but I just want to [laughter] -- like, I'm thinking about despair and joy and suicide and the opioid crisis from a theological perspective. And when I think about despair from a theological perspective, what I see is that people begin to feel that even though they can see others, that people cannot reach them. People cannot connect with them. People don't see them, understand them, truly hear them. Also despair tends to give us the feeling that... Nothing will heal or bring us relief from our pain. And so we've become hopeless about the idea that, like, healing is possible for us. Despair also tends to come from the sense that our life has become ineffective, that we've failed massively, and we can't recover from it. That we've lost our sense of self, that we don't know who we are or where we're going or where we've been. That we're not a part of some sort of larger story that's being told, you know? And so joy is the opposite of all of that. Joy is the feeling that we get when we recognize and feel connected to meaning, to truth, to beauty, to goodness, and to other people. Joy is a realization of relatedness, to these sorts of things, right? And so the more that we can help people to have realizations of connection, to meaning truth, beauty, goodness, to one another, the more we help people to resist despair in their lives. Sushama (32:01): Yeah. You're making me think about kind of the moment that we're in also as a country, I feel in some way, we're in a -- it feels like collective grief, collective despair on all fronts, in every way that you can think about it. And it could be anything from racial injustice to, you know, like the reshaping and kind of like, degradation of like our democratic ideals, like, and anywhere in between all, all these ideas in between. But there's kind of a collective grief happening, a collective despair. But I don't, I'm not finding there's room for much collective joy right now and how we, we get people to some joy or to some joyfulness or to looking at some of our, of these issues in a more hopeful way. What are you, what are you thinking about like collective joy? Angela (33:03): No, it is a thing. I think the best example, and Brene Brown has pointed this out in her work, is in sports. Sports really demonstrate collective sorrow and collective joy in a very powerful way. I mean, we saw it at the national championship game two Monday nights ago. And you know, I gotta give a shout out to the Baylor men's basketball team. You know, but it's so interesting. I actually preached about this last Sunday that, you know, at the national championship game, it's just, you see right at the end of that game, this collective sorrow and collective joy just collide. And it's, you know, because Jalen Suggs is crying and Mark Vital is crying. They're both crying for very different reasons. One is weeping. One is rejoicing. You know, and so we see collective joy and sorrow in sports. And I think that's why sports are so powerful in people's lives, because it's this space that we have to feel like I'm with these other people in what I'm feeling. Angela (34:04): So we feel very, very connected to other people, and we feel permission to feel deeply in sports. I don't know that there's any place that people feel such exuberant joy or such profound sadness, so publicly, right? Sushama (34:20): Yes! Angela (34:20): And so sports are interesting. And the Sports Institute at Baylor, they're doing some really interesting work in thinking theologically about sports, so I just want to give a shout out to them as well. But basically what you're saying about collective despair, collective sorrow. I absolutely feel it too. I literally, I woke up to the news headlines this morning of this young, 13-year-old boy being shot in Chicago by police. And I literally, I just, and I'm looking -- I follow black liturgies on Instagram. I commend them to everyone. And it's just literally all they can like post this morning is like -- inhale. Like, we are sad, you know, something to the effect of like, we're sad -- exhale, please, like, help us not to give over to despair. Angela (35:05): I, you know, it's like when George Floyd's trial is going on, and then we hear about Dante Wright. And now we hear about this young 13 year old. It's like, I don't -- it's so hard for me to have any hope going forward for policing in the United States. It is. It's like, and I want to believe that there's hope, but I can understand why so many people would say like, there is no hope for redeeming this, you know? There is no hope for, like... All we can imagine is that we have to rethink the whole thing because like, how can this be redeemed? You know? And so, yeah, it's very -- there are certain aspects of American life right now that it's very hard to not just say like, this is irredeemable. Like this is lost, and nothing can be found. Right. You know what I mean? Sushama (35:57): Nothing. And when you think about, you know, a 13-year-old boy, and I have a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, and it's like, now I won't go, I won't be too dramatic. It's not all joy, but most of it, of their childhood is joy. It is pure joy. That's what we're aiming for. That's what they're aiming for. That mostly, it's a lot of joy. So for a 13-year-old to be gone out of our lives, because of a collective crisis is really, really painful. And I appreciate you naming that. It's really painful. Angela (36:32): Yeah. Well, and what I was going to say about it too, is like, when it comes to joy, it's like, we can't rush joy. And I do, I do think that in the case of the kind of week that we're having with [inaudible], you know, with this trial going on, and I mean, I think for me, George Floyd's trial is just so representative of the fact that, like the fact that we have to have this, like, very long trial, about a murder that everyone saw is so, so painful and disorienting. Sushama (37:06): I'm with you. Yes. Angela (37:06): It's like, we all watched it. Everyone watched it. Sushama (37:12): We saw it! [crosstalk] Angela (37:12): Everyone saw it! Like, everyone saw it. And so I think it's very important for me to say today that there are obstacles to joy, but not that -- in that they're bad, but like one is anger, especially righteous anger, and fear. Where fear resides, it's difficult for joy to make its way to us. When anger resides, like where anger resides, it's difficult for joy to make its way to us. And that's not a bad thing. Anger and fear are emotions that teach us. That -- if there's anything I've learned over the last four and a half years, it's that emotions are not -- I don't really like using the words 'negative emotions and positive emotions' actually. I mean, I have been saying positive, like, about joy, but I don't really think that there are bad emotions. I think every emotion is a teacher, if we let it, right? That there's wisdom there. Anger, especially righteous anger says there's something wrong. There's something broken that needs to be fixed. And so there, like, we have to work through anger and fear in constructive ways and saying, what are you teaching me? What do I need to do in response to this emotion? You know, we have to listen to them, you know? And so I don't, and I think that's for us to get to collective joy. We have to first, like, constructively work through our anger, our lament, our fear. Sushama (38:35): Yeah, yeah, yes. To all of that. I want to talk about the women's prison for a little bit too, because I wanted to hear some of your stories. That feels like that was a place of some healing, working with these women, that it was a place of some healing for you. And I want to know who (again without naming names, but just illustrations), who were some of the women? What did they offer you during that time that felt therapeutic or felt like it helps you along in your own healing coming off of this season? Angela (39:07): Yes, absolutely. These women got me on the road to healing. No doubt about it. There is... the second part of the title of the book, the subtitle is 'a story of being lost and found,' I'm the person who was lost, who was found. And I was found in this, strangely enough... I found myself and my sense of faith. And I found that I could hold my faith and doubt together with these women in this Bible study. I came alive for the first time after -- I felt, I think I felt numb. And I felt like I was dead for like a year and a half. And then they like, awoke -- and they awakened something in me. And I say very clearly in both the dedication of the book, and then in the last chapter, that I don't claim that the joy that they brought me was also present in them. But it's important for me, like, to say, you know, I hope that the joy that they brought me at some point is theirs, too. But these women were so critical in my own healing journey. One, because they had been through so much. These women had been, almost all of them, sexually abused. Almost all of them had grown up in foster care at some point in their life. They had spent time in foster care in a group home. Almost all of them were caught up in cycles of poverty. Almost all of them had parents who were caught up in cycles of substance use. And yet these women would cling to God. They prayed the most honest prayers that I've ever heard. And in that room, there was, like, such respect for one another. If you were over 45 or 50, they called you Miss, like Miss Aliyah, for example, as a sign of respect among each other. Angela (41:12): And so all of us, the Bible study co-leaders, we followed them. We called particular women Miss, like Miss Aliyah, just following their lead, but this was not something we did. It was something that they did. Their ability to humanize one another in such a dehumanizing situation, after all that they had been through, was remarkable to me. And specifically like, when I think about Miss Aliyah and one of those, like, you know, on the last day that I was in the prison, I said that she was like, "Angela, I want to sing a song for you." And, you know, and so then she just like stands up in the room, and she starts singing Amazing Grace, off-pitch, and then a few sentences in, she forgets what she's saying, and she sits down and it's like, "I'm so sorry. I forgot the words." And yet, after spending a year in that prison, it was so perfect because I had realized that to live... To live exposed, vulnerable, honest, without shame, is to be truly human. And that's the only way to actually live well. In this room, there was no shame, which is why we sang so loudly and we danced and we told bold stories. Angela (42:39): You know, I tell another story in the book. I mean, there was a moment when Vanessa was trying to help a young woman who was being bullied on her tier, get off a different, her tier and get into another part of the prison. And so Vanessa like, "Hey, grab -- like, we need a piece of paper. And so she rips out a piece of paper of her notebook, and she gives it to her and she's like, "Millie, like here, just start writing a letter to this person." Because Vanessa had been in prison for about nine years. And so she knew what was going on and she knew the places of power in the prison. Angela (43:10): And so she's like "Here, like, write down, you're going to write to this person." And Millie's like, "I can't write." You know, and she's like 22 years old, but the education system has failed her. Right. And so she cannot write, and Vanessa then says, "Oh, it's okay, I'll write it. And then you just sign it, and give it to this person." And it was like, you know, there's so many moments, I feel like, outside of that room where somebody realizes somebody else can't write, or they sing off-pitch, or they forget something. And there's like this moment of like, ugh -- like, where you kind of look at someone, and you're like, what? Like you can't -- what? You know, and you have this reaction to each other that then induces immediately, like, shame and a sense of like, "Oh, wow. I just told you something. I shared something. I made a mistake in front of you. Like, and now I feel vulnerable and exposed and it's not good." No, in this room when you were vulnerable and exposed and real, it was welcomed and accepted. And it was like, you're deeply human. Welcome. [laughs] Oh my God, it's the most refreshing thing in the world. Sushama (44:17): I was just thinking, where does that happen? That's so refreshing! Angela (44:21): I mean, I say in *The Gravity of Joy* in chapter five, that nothing is half-baked in prison. That's why I felt so alive there. And that's my great hope and prayer that these women leave prison and then are able to cultivate these kinds of spaces in their own lives. You know, because I just, I don't, like, I don't want it to have to be prison that gets people, people to that place. You know? Interlude (44:45): [sound of water droplet] Sushama (44:45): That's beautiful. I mean, so authentic and I don't know -- you're right, where... What other spaces that that would happen. There's so much, and I'm looking at our time. I want to get maybe two quick, two last quick questions. And if you're willing, one is to ask you about, as people read this, as they look at your interviews, as they're kind of Googling around who you are and what your work is. What do you want people to get from this book, of course, but also from your research and your life's journey of talking and thinking about joy? Angela (45:21): So there are several things that I want people to get. And one thing I want to mention is that my website www.angelagorrell.com (and Gorell is G-O-R-R-E-L-L) -- so angelagorrell.com -- you can have, there's a free discussion, story prompt, and activity guide that goes with *The Gravity of Joy*. And the whole point of creating that guide is that I want this, this book to cultivate conversation about every emotion that people experience in their lives. So, this guide is a guide to talking about the grief of your own life, the losses you've experienced, it's a guide to sharing stories about your own righteous anger and fear, but also of course, your own experiences of joy. It's a guide that all the activities are what I call 'gateways to joy.' And so we can't make it, but we can posture ourselves for it, and we can be open to it. And so, these are all ways to become more open to joy in your life. And so the whole idea of my book is, number one -- I want people to understand joy more and to become more open to it in their lives. And two -- I would love for people to feel like that in telling my story that they have permission to tell theirs. And third, I would love for more people to become part of the groundswell of people who are working to address suicide rates, the opioid crisis, or mass incarceration in the United States, and the epilogue describes each of these three things that are going on and resources for learning more about how to join the groundswell of people working so hard to address these very critical issues. Sushama (47:05): I downloaded the discussion guide. So, it's really great. So thanks for that. Last question for you. And it's... I think it's personal, but it doesn't have to be, I want to know how you're doing, how your life is, how you have grieved and come to some redemptive joy. How's your sister and your family, and where are people in their lives? They really live as characters and real people for me. And I'm sure for many, many, many people who have read the powerful book. So how's everybody doing? How are you doing? Angela (47:38): You know, what's so fascinating about this question is that I think I've done upwards of 25-plus interviews in the last month about this book. I mean, maybe, maybe more. You're the first person to ask that question. So thank you for asking it. Wow. I, you know, I definitely am someone who continues to hold together joy and sorrow. I described in chapter 8 Ezra being at the temple. And like, there are all these people watching the temple be rebuilt, and there's a lot of people weeping because they remember the old house and the way that things used to be. And then there's a lot of people rejoicing because they're seeing the temple be rebuilt and they're excited about it. And I feel so, like the -- I feel like both people that are watching the temple. I am incredibly grateful; this book is being received in the way that it is. The emails, the DMs that I'm getting on Instagram, on Facebook, the texts, it has been so beautiful to see people receive this book. And many people just say to me, you know, Angela, I feel so resonated with like, "I lost a parent a few years ago and I just feel like, wow, you described it in a way that was so, like, 'Yes, you get it.'" You know what I mean? Or "I have felt powerless to help someone that I love, and that I really get it. I have lost someone I love to suicide, and I feel like you honored the experience," you know? And so, that's been so beautiful, but then, you know, it's sobering that, you know, my book was, for example, like in, for the first week, it was the number one new release in Christian death and grief. Angela (49:14): And it was like, wow. I'm so grateful that, wow... This book cost my family so much to write. This book, you know, and then I'm thinking constantly about these women in prison. I prayed for them every Monday through Friday morning. And I'm constantly thinking, I wish I could tell you because now I'm in Texas, so I don't get to see them anymore. I'm going to be, I'm going to actually be a volunteer at a new prison. I'm so looking forward to it, and be investing in, investing in the lives of women who are going to be eight months out from reintegration in the next couple of years, I'm so excited about this work. But I... Even as someone who really is about prison abolition, but so I'll -- I just want to say that. I'm really not, I'm not really about prison reform. I'm more about prison abolition. And yet it's very important to me that as we're on the way to that, that I am with women who are in prison and continue to do this work anyways, I wish that I could tell these women what was happening, that their stories are being told, and that they were not for nothing. [emotional] You know, and that their pain is being made productive. And that, I'm just so grateful to them. You know, it's so funny though, because I say in the book and it's true to this day, to this day, they don't know who I am. They don't know that I have a Ph.D. or that I'm a professor or that I'm an author or anything like that. And it was important because it helped, like, I think our relationship would have been so different if they knew those things. But, so we were just human beings in a room together. Angela (50:54): But my family, you know, my sister Steph, who lost her son, to this day is having a very hard time. She misses him every single day. She doesn't wake up one day without having it, like, at the forefront of her mind. And it's hard. It's hard for her. She's like, you know, I don't know, like, like she -- she knows she'll never entirely like heal from it. And she's like, so she just tries to do her life realizing that, you know, that she just, she has this backpack. That's what she describes it as. Like, every day I put on my backpack of, like, grief and I just carry it with me everywhere I go. And she's like, you know, that's just her reality now. My little sister and my older sister, Alison, I mean, all of us, you know, we just... [sigh] we have ups. It's just like, there are days when we really think, you know, we're going to be okay and everything, you know, and we're making the best of this. And, you know, we're -- I don't know, we lean on each other. And then days when we just all kind of, like, text about it or call each other, we like Zoom or FaceTime about it. And we're just like, damn, like, it's still so hard. You know? So that's the honest, raw answer, is like, on many days, especially particular holidays and birthdays. And, you know, it's very hard for us still. Sushama (52:19): Yeah. Angela (52:19): And obviously like my book brought all of that back for everybody, right? And so I have to also, I guess, close this by just saying I am indebted to the women who I met in prison. I am indebted to all of my sisters, to my family, my extended family, for their willingness to allow their stories, to be implicated in the telling of mine. I'm grateful to them for giving me the consent to use their names, to tell their story as well. Interlude (52:54): [background percussion music] Angela (52:54): And just, yeah, it's -- so, and they're all -- a lot of them, they're leading their own groups about this book. They're doing a book club on the book, [crosstalk] and I think that's really good for them. Sushama (53:07): That's wonderful. Well, we're grateful for your story and for your work, your gift to the church, your gifts. This book is a gift. I really appreciate your honesty and just all that you have offered today and all that you offered in the book. So thank you so, so very much, Angela. Dayle (53:26): [background percussion music] You've been listening to The Distillery. Interviews are conducted by me, Dayle Rounds, and me, Sushama Austin-Connor, and I'm Shari Oosting. I'm Amar Peterman and I am in charge of production. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast app. The Distillery is a production of PrincetonTheological Seminary's Office of Continuing Education. You can find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Thanks for listening. [sound of water droplet]  

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Christian Balldin of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (9:40) Doug Gottlieb: Host Doug Gottlieb Show on Fox Sports Radio and Basketball analyst - (29:24) Dak Prescott returns to the field for OTA's - (32:15) Jaylon Smith's number change and the big year he has ahead of him

- Spurs get huge win over Bucks and get set to face Nets tonight - (11:30) NFL Schedule releasing - (19:50) Could MLB come to San Antonio finally? - (34:13) ESPN SA Injury Update w/ Dr Eloy Ochoa of the Sports Institute at TSAOG

- Dann Quinn speaks to media regarding his defense and changes he will make - (10:46) NBA Marvel game, and Russell Westbrook continues to amaze - (19:43) Aaron Rodgers gets called out by Farve and Bradshaw, but is that get off my lawn talk? - (34:36) ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. Lane Naugher of the Sports Institute at the TSAOG

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr. David Espinoza of the Sports Institute at TSAOG Orthopedics - (12:18) Shohei Ohtani being an ace pitcher and leading the league in Home Runs brings an interesting proposition, which would you rather be a power hitter or an ace?

- ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr Thomas DeBerardino of the Sports Institute at TSAOG - (12:07) Spurs win 2nd straight impressively again. Who could their next All-Star be? - ( 23:20) Could the Cowboys move down from 10 in the NFL Draft? - (34:48) Cowboys troubles at drafting Cornerbacks these past few years

- UCF changing the game? Mel Kiper Mock Draft 4.0 sees Cowboys trade abck - (14:24) Mark Cuban, Luka Doncic and the Play-In Tournament - (24:47) Spurs dominate the Magic, play better on road - (32:43) ESPN San Antonio Injury Update w/ Dr Josh Bell of the Sports Institute at TSAOG

Concussions are serious injuries that can alter the way your brain works, causing symptoms that range from painful headaches to difficulties with balance, vision, memory and reasoning. To learn more about what causes concussions, and how they can be treated, Tom chats with Doctor Matthew Daggy, a specialist in primary care sports medicine at the TriHealth Orthopedic and Sports Institute; Kellen Reed, a student athlete from Ross High School who recently recovered from a concussion; and his father Paul.

Dr. Paul Putz (@P_Emory) is historian, author, and educator who focuses most of his time thinking about the intersection of sports and Christianity. In this conversation with Chad, Dr. Putz discusses: The role of sports in character development Personality vs. Intentionality Coaches blind spots And much more... Follow us on Twitter: @ChristCoachPod Follow us on Instagram: @ChristCoachPod @ChristCoachPod

"J. Gresham Machen was one of many to fall under the spell of football. 'When I see a vacant field on one of these autumn days,' Machen wrote to a friend while in Europe in 1905, 'my mind is filled with wonder at this benighted people which does not seem to hear the voice of nature when she commands every human being to play football or watch it being played.'” Join us we sit down with Dr. Paul Putz (Assistant Director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Truett Seminary) and discuss the intersection of sports & Christianity asking questions like: Where do sports fit in the created order? Or do they belong to the fall? If God is glorified by a good catch, then is he disappointed in a botched field goal? Can you give us a brief survey of Christian America's view on the game of football and where we are today? Would God rather I watch a football game or evangelize? What is it about sports - why do we humans love them so much… And not just a lil, but a lot: we're talking grown men painting their faces, standing shirtless in the snow drinking buying $20 beers, and having the time of their lives… And they're not even playing – their watching someone else play!!!!! If the Bucs win, is it because Tom Brady can do “all things through Christ who strengthens him”? What's the most Christian thing I can do this Sunday as I'm eating slow-cooked-pineapple-infused lil-smokies drizzled with nacho-cheese - and watching the football game with my family? LINKS: “‘God Disguised as Michael Jordan' (and My Evolving View of Sports)” “Football and the Political Act of Prayer” “God and the Gridiron Game America's obsession with football is nearly as old as the game itself.”

Today's episode is sponsored by Elvation Medical with special guest Dr. Chris Scott. He's the Director of Rehabilitation and a Physical Therapist at Repair Sports Institute. Whether it be physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, or fitness training, Repair Sports Institute's goal is to make sure patients walk away with a healthy mind, body + spirit. ELvation Medical Sponsor: www.ELvationUSA.com Contact ELvation Medical Instagram: http://bit.ly/2jkYr0B Facebook: https://bit.ly/3coZpBP Youtube: http://bit.ly/2WcD1Ud

Suzanne Leach of Rehabilitation and Sports Institute joins us to drop the knowledge on recovery, sleep, and picking the right shoes, among MANY other things!  Suzanne not only has the education to back her knowledge up,  but the experience as well.  This is one episode you don't want to miss.   Redcon1.com discount code: T20Cabell for 20% off. Intro and outro produced by TheSoulChemist @ soulchemist.com