And the team’s fans find this horrifying, not heartwarming. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.” It’s a cliché, of course, the kind of thing uttered as a sound bite in high school sports. Early in the series, Ted tells a reporter named Trent Crimm: “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. Ted takes it all in stride, angering fans with his apparent lack of concern with winning. Lasso, an American football coach hired to coach soccer - a sport he knows little about - for the English football club AFC Richmond is often derided by the public and the press. And yet, they teach the rest of us how to live. Rejecting respectability and embracing humility and love, holy fools are so profoundly out of step with the broader world that they appear to be ridiculous or even insane and often invite ridicule. Holy fools dwell in ordinary, secular life, but they approach it with completely different values. Ivanov writes that in the Orthodox tradition the term designates “a person who feigns insanity, pretends to be silly, or who provokes shock or outrage by his deliberate unruliness.” In other words, the holy fool is a person who flouts social conventions to demonstrate allegiance to God. In his book “Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond,” the historian Sergey A.

The holy fool, or yurodivy (also spelled iurodivyi), is a well-known, though controversial, character in Russian Orthodox spirituality. There are famous “Christ figures” like Gandalf in “Lord of the Rings,” Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories, and Anna in “Frozen.” Seen through this lens, Ted Lasso is another kind of religious archetype: a modern-day holy fool. There is no shortage of religious archetypes in literature and in popular entertainment. We discover throughout the series that it is in this very silliness that his power is found. It’s clear that he’s a sort of clown, with this scene even hinting at a clown car shtick. They climb into an impossibly small car, and Ted calls out to Rebecca, his serious, conniving new boss, “Look! This car has an invisible steering wheel!,” mimicking steering on the left side of the car (as we do on this side of the pond). In the pilot episode, Ted, wide-eyed and folksy, arrives in England after relocating from Kansas with his friend Coach Beard. The show’s protagonist and title character, played by Jason Sudeikis, is ebullient, kind and, though smart, persistently silly. Each Wednesday night my husband and I tune in to watch “ Ted Lasso,” the Emmy award-winning Apple TV+ comedy series.

Tish warren liturgy of the ordinary