Baseball and Religion

From PBS-

BOB FAW, correspondent: New York University president John Sexton oversees more than 40 thousand students and a $2.5 billion budget. He’s expanding the university at home and abroad while contending with some faculty members who oppose his high-powered management style.

JOHN SEXTON (President, NYU): (speaking to students) We’re going to do just a little bit of a wrap up.

FAW: And yet, like few university presidents, Sexton also finds time to teach four classes. He is famous for greeting his students and anyone else, for that matter, with a hearty hug, and demanding nothing less than their absolute best.
SEXTON: (speaking to students) Eugene O’Neill famously said he who stops at mere success and does not press on to glorious failure is a spiritual middle-classer. I don’t want you stopping at the easy. None of you. 

FAW: Now the former law school dean and distinguished legal scholar has written a most unusual book: “Baseball as a Road to God.” That’s right, baseball.

SEXTON: The similarities between baseball and religion abound. The ballpark as cathedral; saints and sinners; the curses and blessings. But then what I’m arguing is beyond that surface level, there’s a fundamental similarity between baseball and religion which goes to the capacity of baseball to cause human beings, in a context they don’t think of as religious, to break the plane of ordinary existence into the plane of extraordinary existence. 


 More here-

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/april-26-2013/baseball-and-religion/16067/

Also at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/books/2013/04/john_sexton_s_baseball_as_a_road_to_god_reviewed.html