Dr. Paul Putz Wins Guittard Book Award for The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports
Dr. Paul Emory Putz, Baylor History Ph.D., Director of the Faith & Sports Institute and program director for Master of Arts in Theology and Sports Studies at Baylor’s Truett Theological Seminary, has won two prestigious awards for his new book, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports.
Dr. Putz’s book has won the 2024 Guittard Book Award, which celebrates the highest quality scholarship in the field of history published by faculty and graduates of the Baylor History Department. The award also honors the legacy of former Baylor history professor and department chair, Dr. Francis Gevrier Guittard, and the ongoing contributions of the Guittard family to the Baylor History Department in the form of the Guittard History Fund.
The Spirit of the Game examines the intersection between American Protestantism and athletics in the twentieth century, exploring how faith and sports have shaped American identity and using sports as a lens to understand transformational shifts in American Christianity.
One Guittard Book Award judge praised The Spirit of the Game as the “clear winner. . . . a well-researched and well-written examination of the role of Christianity in American sports . . . . [that] will help to transform how we think about the relationship between Christianity and popular culture in the 20th century.” Another judge noted that “even for the non-specialist, its intervention is clear—it extends the attention to the entanglements of Protestantism and athletics beyond World War I and brings mainline Protestants (not just neo-evangelicals) into the story.
Dr. Putz credits his childhood playing sports and his time as a student in Baylor History’s Graduate Program as providing the foundation for his book:
I was a pastor's kid, and I had also played sports throughout high school and college. I knew sports formed and shaped people in important ways, providing a cultural narrative through which people made sense of their own lives and their hopes for the future. But I wanted to know more about how Christians had engaged with sports in the past, and how they developed institutions and ideas about the meaning of sports that continue to influence American Christianity and society as a whole today.
Exploring those questions led me to my dissertation project at Baylor, which I completed in 2018. And out of that dissertation came my book, in 2024. I did quite a bit of revising and additional research to turn the dissertation into the book, but the foundation for it was those five years I spent at Baylor learning from mentors like my supervisor, Barry Hankins, and the incredible group of scholars that serve in the history department. I really couldn't have picked a more supportive place to learn what it means to be a historian than Baylor.
The Spirit of the Game has also won the prestigious Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History for outstanding scholarship in the field of Christian history by a first-time author.
Congratulations, Dr. Putz!