Baseball as a Road to God
Seeing Beyond the Game
-
-
3.9 • 27 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can baseball be a "road to God"? Sexton, the president of New York University, a former Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and tortured Yankees convert, considers the question as only an academic can. He draws heavily on the writings of University of Chicago professor Mircea Eliade, who proposed the existence of a phenomenon known as a "hierophany," a connection to the "ineffable domain" of sacred manifestations, or in layman's terms, the "touching of a transcendent plane." With assists from journalists Oliphant (The Boston Globe) and Schwartz (Forbes), Sexton weaves supporting testimonials from physicists, authors, transcendentalists, and theologians into his reasoning over the course of nine chapters, or innings, with his summary reserved for the 10th. After loading the bases through nine, though, Sexton confesses that his thesis is little more than a balk. Baseball is not a "Road to God," even if it can awaken us to an "often missing" dimension of life. That's deflating after his logical progression from thesis to proof, but it's a thought-provoking proposition for zealots and skeptics alike.
Customer Reviews
Good baseball writing is the best
Made me think, laugh, and smile. I’m fortunate to love a sport that attracts great writers.
Schoolwork?
This is a very dense book, not what I expected. It takes time to read and I can see why it's used at the authors college courses. I can't recommend this unless you are taking a religion course....