The more than 100-year-old roots of Eldridge’s mega-popular book, Wild at Heart:
Eliot was justifying the inclusion of athletics in college education as a way of making education appealing to boys who would rather be fly-fishing than studying. That same justification was at the root of a nearly contemporaneous movement within British and American Christianity, the movement most commonly known by the name assigned by English novelist Charles Kingsley: “muscular Christianity.”