Baseball as a Road to God

I will teach a Westminster Presbyterian Church Sunday School class inspired by John Sexton's book, Baseball as a Road to God (Amazon here), co-authored by Tom Oliphant and Peter Schwartz.  The class will be from 4/24 through 5/15 (4 classes), from 9:30am to 10:30am (Eastern Time).  The class will be hybrid -- some attendees in person and others attending by Zoom.  The link for joining by Zoom is:  

[DELETED LINK SINCE THE EVENT HAS FINISHED]

The outline for the sessions in the course is at the end of this blog.

The book came out of a seminar that Sexton, then President of NYU and a former religion professor, taught on the same subject.  Sexton's Wikipedia Page is here..  Sexton has agreed to participate in the second session on 5/1 by Zoom.  (Added 5/1/22 1:00 pm:  I recorded John's session but, by agreement, do not make the recording publicly available; rather, I will make the recording available for those with some connection to Westminster Presbyterian Church and a very small group of others (several, I know, could not attend the session, so the recording was made for them); if you would like the link to the recording, please email me at jack@tjtaxlaw.com to (i) request access and (ii) state your association with Westminster Presbyterian or other reason for wanting access to the video.)

For a teaser about Sexton's knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject, I recommend that all view his interview by Bill Moyers (linked below).  I also recommend that those interested in this class at least sample the offerings below.  For those not reading the book, I highly recommend the Moyers interview.

The following is from a 2012 New York Times article titled Baseball Has Its Worshipers, and at N.Y.U., You Get Credit, here:

On the night before opening day, the end of a baseball fan’s version of Advent, John Sexton entered his classroom at New York University to speak of Joe DiMaggio. He came to speak, too, of Ernest Hemingway and Gay Talese, of Lord Krishna and a sacred tree in the Amazon, and what he called “this notion of touching the ineffable.”

The core of the book in one word is “ineffable,” which he uses 42 times in the book.  (The other time in the book is in the Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin.)  Merriam Webster's primary definition is "incapable of being expressed in words." Sexton uses it to describe religion and God.  He illustrates in the book things we "know" but cannot logic out or express in words:

We cannot define the ineffable, even though we can experience and “know” it profoundly (I know Lisa, my wife, loves me). And we can evoke it—in story or “myth” (not myth as “falsehood,” but myth in the original, sublime sense of the word).

Back to the NYT article:

“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”

I encourage all potentially interested in the course to sample the video offerings below and to attend the second class (5/1) that Sexton will attend by Zoom.  Then I hope to guide for the following three sessions with some of my inspirations from the book.  

In the offering at Villanova Church, one of the co-authors, a student from the class, reads the closing of the book, which I quote:

Okay. Baseball, for most of us anyway, is not the road to God—indeed, it is not even a road to God. But, if given sensitive attention, it can awaken us to a dimension of life often missing in our contemporary world of hard facts and hard science. We can learn, through baseball, to experience life more deeply. By embracing the ineffable joys of the “green fields of the mind,” we can enlarge our capacity to embrace the ineffable more generally. Baseball can teach us that living simultaneously the life of faith and the life of the mind is possible, even fun. 

And each winter, as we long for the possibilities of spring with its awakening, and as we ponder the depths of mystical moments past in baseball and in life, we proclaim our creed: 

Wait’ll Next Year!

Please remember that phrase,  "Wait'll Next Year!," for it is evocative of the possibility and the wonder.  But Sexton's main point is that baseball is not magic, just as Eliade's sacred stone is not magic.  It is just an occasion among many occasions in life where we can "notice" the world around us and, in it, the sacred and profane.

This class will not require reading the materials on Sexton's reading list for his course.  The reading list at the time of the Moyers interview is here. (A more expanded reading list of the books and articles used over the years is in Appendix One to the book.)  Participants will be able to get something out of the class even if they have not read the book Baseball as a Road to God, although reading the book is highly recommended.  I will have some ancillary materials available for free.

A caveat:  Sexton and I were Brooklyn Dodgers fans in our youths.  So our anecdotes in the class may lean a bit toward the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Additional Resources:

• Bill Moyers PBS interview of Sexton, video here and transcript here)
• Sexton talk on Baseball as a Road to God at St. Thomas of Villanova Church, here.
• Sexton interview on the book on Richard Heffner's PBS Open Mind, here.
• City Talk - Doug Muzzie Interview of Sexton, here.
• NYU Alumni Speakers on the Square 2013 with Sexton, Oliphant, and Schwartz, here.  This offering has some good discussion of the bonding between the Brooklyn community and the Dodgers (starting at 51 minutes); this is the longest offering but it is probably the best for those really wanting to get into the book because all three authors make strong contributions.
• MLB sponsored documentary to be released in October 2022, here.
  
• Scott Korb, John Sexton on baseball and faith (Slate 4/5/12), here.

Outline of the course sessions.  (These may be supplemented or changed as the course progresses). 

Date	Topic	Materials
4/24	Introduction   - Scope of Sessions   - Concepts   -  Anecdotes in Context   - Sacred Space and Sacred Time	Book (Not Required)   - Foreword (Doris Kearns Goodwin)       - The Knothole Gang   - First Inning – Sacred Space and Sacred Time Other   Eliade The Sacred and Profane excerpt  re stone or tree here   Sexton on Eliade from First Inning, here.   Sexton On Charlie Winans, here
5/1	John Sexton led discussion by Zoom	A summary of some central themes in Sexton's discussion, here.
5/8	Themes from the chapters on Second Inning to Fifth inning	On faith, doubt, conversion and miracles.
5/15	Themes from the chapters on Sixth Inning through Ninth Inning and The Clubouse (after Ninth Inning)	On blessings and curses, saints and sinners, seventh-inning stretch, community and nostalgia.