[Atlasphere]Bernstein quoted on USA Today front page

[O-Land News Junkie]

is quoted extensively in a front page article in USA Today about the soul of sport champions:  

Andrew Bernstein, a philosophy professor at Marist College, believes he knows why sports stars are so immense-ly popular in modern culture: Humans have a deep yearning for the heroic — and for momentary glimpses of human perfection.

“We recognize, at least at some gut level, that a great champion isn’t just supremely gifted,” Bernstein says. “The sheer will to excel is what we find so admirable.”

“The Greeks worshiped human excellence,” Marist’s Bernstein says. “The great athletes competed naked. The statues we have from the Greeks show human beingsas strong and beautiful and healthy. Michelangelo revived that in the Renaissance. This sort of wor-ship of the human body is almost religious.”

Bernstein isn’t. He is an atheist who believes in the sanctity of human achievement. When Bernstein speaks of “soul of a champion” — he once wrote an open letter to Jordan with that title — he doesn’t mean soul in a religious sense.

“It’s a spiritual thing,” Bernstein says. “It’s in someone’s moral character — some indefatigable quality that a person has that they’re not going to be denied.”

Read the entire article.

http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/588.php