2018 Outstanding Faculty Award Winner

Greenhoe Lecturer at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary’s annual Festival of Theology

Nominated for Outstanding Professor (tenure-track) for Scholarship at Baylor University

Faith and Sport Institute: Running the Race Well (Lilly Endowment): Faculty Director 

American Academy of Religion (AAR) : Member

Society for the Study of Christian Ethics (SSCE) : Member

Pursuit of bodily excellence: Paul Weiss’s platonic (Religious) imagination of sports

How Can We Help? The Role of the Local Church and Other Religious Organizations When the Games Come to Town

Sacramentally Imagining Sports as a Form of Worship: Reappraising Sport as a Gesture of God

Baylor University, a private Christian university and a nationally ranked research institution, provides a vibrant campus community for more than 15,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship.

Baylor University 

Dr. John B. White is a native of the Midwest and in particular, he is a Hoosier where he raced in the legendary cycling race, "The Little 500" at Indiana University, on Team Cutters, which the film Breaking Away dramatizes.

His PhD is from The University of Edinburgh where he studied moral theology with Michael Northcott and his dissertation was on Christianity and Sports- Sport and Christian ethics: Towards a theological ethic for sport. He also completed an M.Div. and an M.A. at T.E.D.S. where he completed his thesis with Kevin Vanhoozer. John’s publications have appeared in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Implicit Religion, Studies in Christian Ethics, Practical Theology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Bible and Ethics, and he recently co-edited books with Routledge Press (2016), Cambridge Scholars and Mercer Press (2017). He also has a book under contract with Baker Academic. He is the Principal Investigator and Faculty Director of the newly established Faith and Sport Institute: Running the Race Well at Baylor University, which is funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment, Inc. He is regularly interviewed on the subject matter of Christianity and sports in prominent news media and periodicals such as CBS, Sports Illustrated, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. For more information about the intersection of Christianity and sports, see “The Declaration of Sport and Christian Life” which John is a Founding member of the Sport and Christianity Group (2013-) which developed this manifesto.

Christianity and Sports

Moral Theology

Theology of Culture

Faculty Page

Google Scholar

Cheating Sports: Michigan Football's Latest Scandal

Opinion: Cancel your summer camp plans to keep kids safe

The Face and Soul of Sports: Who are We Becoming in the School of Sports?

Sacramental Body Matters: Reimagining Sensual and Strenuous Bodies in Sports

The Violence of Everyone and No One: Sport, Banality, and Structural Change

John B. White, Truett Seminary, Holder of the Harold and Dottie Riley Associate Professor of Practical Theology; Director of the Sports Chaplaincy/Ministry Program

Lilly Endowment Inc.

Summer Sabbatical Research Grant

Capacity-Building Grant

Harold and Dottie Riley Associate Professor of Practical Theology and Dottie Riley Director of the Sports Chaplaincy/Ministry Program

Select Inquiry Type