BASEBALL AS A ROAD TO GOD
The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality.
For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other.
Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others.
Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.
For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other.
Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others.
Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.
William James defined religion as "the experiences of human individuals insofar as they see themselves related to whatever they regard as divine"... so presumably, the church of baseball might be right for some. But if you regarded nothing as divine, in a supernatural sense, and if your experience of religion was of the supernatural sort, then "church" might not be the right word for this variety of secular devotion. The question remains, though: can a secular devotion be sacred? I say, why not?
ReplyDeleteBut note: the secular/sacred road leads not to god, but to nature and life. James believed that, not god, to be at the heart of what he called "THE religious impulse."
Delete"Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow..." The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lec. II https://www.gutenberg.org/files/621/621-h/621-h.html#toc5
Delete"Not God but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is... the end of religion."
DeleteYou could interpret this as a nod to the afterlife, but James's point would still be that the life-impulse is a natural one for humans.