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Touchdown Jesus - Faith and Fandom at Notre Dame
Released in October 2005 to a near-banning by the Notre Dame bookstore (it has since reluctantly agreed to carry a copy or two), Scott Eden’s Touchdown Jesus is a book about fanaticism, obsession, passion, Catholicism, and that peculiarly American sporting phenomenon: college football. It's also about a place that inspires devotion to the point of pilgrimage and loathing to the point of bigotry. It is a portrait of an ensemble cast of those fans who die the hardest when the Irish lose on autumn Saturdays. And it is a narrative of ivory-tower political machinations and the uniquely Notre Dame personalities—priests, administrators, academics, coaches—who must deal with this institution's greatest boon and its direst dilemma, which is football. It is, at bottom, an attempt to understand what drives big-time spectator sport: the money, the tribalism, the myth-making power of the masses, the need to believe.