At the annual meeting of the European Academy of Religion, 8-12 July 2025 in Vienna, the panel ‘The Meaning of Sensibility, Movement, and Sports: Embodied Encounters with the Sacred’ will take place. This panel is organized by Sabine Wolsink (University of Vienna), Aldo Houterman (Erasmus University Rotterdam), and Hajo Schuurman (University of Bern).

For many people today, sport is a meaningful activity in their daily lives. However, the notion that religion has been replaced by sports since the 1960s fails as an interpretative framework for the relation between embodied existence and the sacred (Ruud Stokvis). Secularization does not account for the existential dimension of our moving bodies, for example, how humans give or receive meaning through their senses and physical being in the world (Mark Johnson). It also limits the sacred to traditional religion and religious practices, without imagining the sacred in other ways (Richard Kearney).Moving beyond the paradigm that sports are the new religion, this panel will explore the ways in which the sacred can be encountered in embodied practices of movement and sports. Particular attention will be paid to the phenomenological tradition and its relationship to the body and the sacred, as exemplified in the work of Michel Serres, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, more recently, Richard Kearney. These writers emphasize how we experience our relationship to the world through our senses and our physical being in the world, while this very encounter touches something other or more (i.e. transcendence) in everyday reality. This immanent transcendence (Kearney after Ricoeur) opens the space for an aesthetics of transubstantiation (Serres) in which the sacred is found in the embodied existence of the world. How do people encounter the sacred in sports, understood as the movement of embodied beings? What role do religious concepts, such as transubstantiation, transformation, or transcendence, play in the context of movement and sports? These and other questions will be discussed in the panel.

The full programme will be available on 21 May 2025 on the website of the conference: https://www.europeanacademyofreligion.org/euare2025