WHAT SOCCER SAYS ABOUT GLOBALIZATION

Think of the globe as one big spinning soccer ball. It may as well be. Like stitching on a ball, soccer is the common thread among countries around the world. David Beckham is the world's most famous athlete, inspiring hairdos in Japan and statues in Thailand. Soccer leagues crossed borders in Europe long before the European Union. Now owners comb continents searching for star players to import. "More than basketball of even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, soccer is the most globalized institution on the planet," writes Franklin Foer in Foreign Policy, in an excerpt from his forthcoming book on soccer and globalization.

But if the pitch on which world athletes compete portends what globalization will become, Foer says, you can see its limits. "A tangle of intensely local loyalties, identities, tensions, economies, and corruption endures—in some cases not despite globalization, but because of it," he writes. When a Swedish coach took over England's national team, much to the country's chagrin, the result was nonetheless a very familiar brand of "old-fashioned, gritty English football," Foer says. Likewise, foreign capital can't overcome the inept management of Brazilian leagues, and the lasting bitterness of the rivalry between Glasgow's Celtic and Rangers clubs is nothing less than an "unfinished fight over the Protestant Reformation." For readers weary of numbing economic and militaristic analysis of globalization, Foer's essay is an engaging look at how global cultures are coming together—and staying intact.

Related:
Tech jobs and customer service call centers migrate from U.S. to India, from Wired and CBS' 60 Minutes
Disney: America's global legacy from the Christian Science Monitor
Earlier:
Religion as a catalyst for global development
Global resistance to 'McWorld'
The world's changing borders, maps, and cities

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

MIDRAND, South Africa—Consider the giant bullfrog, but better from a distance. Vile tempered, toothy, carnivorous and the size of a medium pizza at adulthood, it bites hard enough to dent a broomstick. It has been known to lunch on rinkhals, a cousin of the cobra. It has attacked lions and even elephants when provoked. … In the land of prowling cheetahs, submerged hippos and leaping antelopes, the giant bullfrog does not attract much notice. … South Africans in the poor northern provinces tend to view them as dinner. Richer South Africans notice them only when they show up in their swimming pools or squashed under the wheels of their cars. Even encyclopedias of frogs tend to focus instead on the exceedingly ugly African clawed frog or the mammoth goliath of Zaire, as big as a small cat. … Under the direction of Caroline Yetman, a doctoral student in zoology at the University of Pretoria, a veterinarian here inserted tiny transmitters under the frogs' skins in an effort to discover more about their natural habitat.

CIVITA DI BAGNOREGIO, Italy — Almost from the moment this hilltop town rose, it began to fall, and for most of the many centuries it has been living, it has also been dying. The Etruscans … were good at battle strategy but apparently bad at land surveys, and when they looked up, up, up to this improbably high summit in the middle of an extremely deep canyon, they saw a position that would be easy to defend, at least from invaders, and clambered to the top. They failed to see a longer-term threat: the flimsy, fickle ground beneath them. "The clay soil here falls away like fresh ricotta," said the mayor, Erino Pompei, whose name bears an uncanny resemblance to that of another ill-fated hamlet at odds with geology. … Civita is stunning: an extremely compact warren of medieval buildings— the ones, that is, that have not tumbled over the edge—on a kind of butte that resembles a ridiculously tall, top-heavy cupcake. Although the rate at which it is crumbling is more or less glacial, Mr. Pompei said the battle to contain the process was intensifying. At the start of this year, he said, engineers began a soil-fortification project that will cost more than $15 million and take 10 years.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• The Catholic priesthood has a generation gap, but it's not the divide between a rigid old guard and progressive young blood, says Andrew Greeley in the current Atlantic Monthly. "A generation of conservative young priests is on the rise in the U.S. Church," he writes. "These are newly ordained men who seem in many ways intent on restoring the pre-Vatican II Church, and who, reversing the classic generational roles, define themselves in direct opposition to the liberal priests who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s." Young priests are only about two thirds as likely as older ones to support the marriage of priests and the ordination of women. The danger, Greeley suggests, is that the views of this new wave of priests will only deepen the divide between the clergy and the more open-minded laity. Full story
• The first two objections to considering Jane Austen as a public theologian are that "she does not seem much interested in things public, and she does not seem much interested in things theological," writes Peter Leithart in his forthcoming book Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen, excerpted in the current First Things. But an exploration of one of Austen's least popular novels, Mansfield Park, reveals Austen's efforts to trace "insidious individualism precisely to the marginalization of the Church in the life of England, the failure of clergy to be the makers of English manners, and the consequent intrusion of other forces as the makers of manners," Leithart says. Austen even hit some Augustinian notes while reflecting on memory and self-awareness. Full story While some of his suggested theological themes seem overextended, Leithart has something to reveal about Austen's work even to her avid readers.
• If we can call Jane Austen a theologian, can we call Charlie Brown an existentialist? Certainly, says Nathan Radke in Philosophy Now. It's not just Lucy's pop psych stand or Linus' futile vigil for the Great Pumpkin; Peanuts consistently asked questions about angst and existence. "Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz's characters exist in a world of silent or absent adult authority," Radke says. "The children of Peanuts are left to their own devices, to try and understand the world they have found themselves thrust into." Full story It may be more of a stretch to tie Sarte to Charles Shulz than to connect Augustine and Austen, but Radke finds a compelling common thread of dour musings throughout the comic strip. If only he'd taken on the more light-hearted pontificating of the more ironically named comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
• From existentialism to extinction: At ten feet and half a ton, the manatee is one of the most gentle and unassuming creatures to be involved in a fierce political fight over preservation. The mammal has been an endangered species ever since the first such list in 1967, but no one knows for sure how many are left. "Both sides have seized on that uncertainty to advance their cause," says Craig Pittman in Smithsonian magazine. "Manatee advocates say the creatures are barely holding their own and may be in peril, while many boaters, anglers and developers argue that the population has recently rebounded and is not in fact endangered." Pittman travels to Florida to visit the manatees' environment and see if things are getting better or worse. Summary and PDF of article
• Fervent as efforts to save the manatee are, to see the future of biodiversity preservation, you have to look up. "High up in the treetops, above the shadowy stillness of the rainforest floor, is a vast network of highways and cities," writes Christian Amodeo, on assignment for the British Geographical magazine. The "forest canopy" is home to 40 percent of the forest's species, and the exclusive home of ten percent. "We're dealing with the richest, least known, most threatened habitat on Earth," says the director of the Global Canopy Programme.
  Amodeo describes the efforts to get a better peek into the canopy—balloons, cranes, and permanent observatories—and explains why the forest canopy is "the final terrestrial frontier." Word document of article
• Update: In my earlier post about a new weblog called The Revealer, I mentioned the blog could benefit from focusing more directly on the daily distortions of religious topics by the media. Now a new blog at www.GetReligion.org by CT associate editor Douglas LeBlanc and syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly seeks, more or less, to do that. (The Revealerwelcomes the new blog but suspects evangelistic motives. Writes Mattingly: "The goal is to offer our commentary on religion coverage—good and bad—in the mainstream news media.") Meanwhile, a subscription-only newsletter called Vital Theology takes aim the superficiality of popular culture.

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.