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A deeply thoughtful, deeply irreverent look at the mythology of playGods and Games ties together Joseph Campbell's approach to myth and religion with Johan Huizinga's view of our species as Homo ludens — "Man the Game-player" — which suggests that play is a central aspect of the human spirit and human culture."A comprehensive and clear review.... loaded with quotations both pertinent and entertaining that may be eye-openers both to traditional religionists and readers who may never have thought about play in a philosophical or religious sense." —Publishers Weekly"The breadth of scholarship and the light-handedness of the author, Professor David L. Miller, make this book a movable, digestible and an enjoyable feast." — Robert Seidenberg, American Imago
Although print versions of this learned and closely reasoned but accessible and often witty book on the relation between religion and play have been hard to find for about four decades, its message that the relation between the two needs to be radically re-examined has lost none of its relevance. The case is quite the contrary in this time of all-too-serious attitudes by religious fundamentalists and their secular counterparts.Miller goes far beyond merely advocating play as a respite enabling us to pursue religious aims more effectively—“the pause that refreshes” in the words of the old Coca-Cola advertising slogan he refers to more than once. He is challenging the whole antithesis between play and seriousness that has marked thought and feeling, especially in Western culture. In his view, the theology of Western Christendom has given religious sanction to Aristotelian Puritanism. “For nineteen centuries the church has continued the faux pas of Platonist idealism and Aristotelian substantialism by baptizing the ideals of intellect and will in the name of Father and Son. Man is thereby made to feel guilty, not only for not being able to mount the heavenly ladder to the ideal Idea, not only for not being able to realize his potential essence, but now also for his sinfulness at not being able to imitate Christian virtue by the laborious task of willing his rationality, his sanity, his imago dei. He cannot manage the task of building the City of God on earth as it is in heaven.”But Miller thinks the tide is turning.“Jesus and Lao-tzu both said something to the effect that the fundamental rule of the divine game is that he who loses wins ultimately. This is certainly the case with the history of the idea of play. For though play suffered a twenty-five-century loss of place as a primary term of human meaning, the history of that failure was to become precisely the motivating factor for the ultimate victory of the idea beginning in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century in the history of the idea of play marks the renaissance of the contemporary fascination with ideas about games and play….”
