Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

Abstract

I begin this review with a brief overview of the book itself, followed by a discussion of its pedagogical usefulness as a text in Philosophy of Sport and Philosophy of Religion courses. I then move on to discuss a few points in the book that I take to be especially interesting and/or problematic from a philosophical point of view

Notes

1. In what follows, when I refer to Sexton, I mean to refer to all authors who had a hand in writing this book. Much of it is written in Sexton’s own voice, so I will assume that it is at least his opinion that is represented in the material I discuss here.

2. It should be made clear that the book is not intended as a philosophical text. At the same time, it makes several claims and arguments that are worth some philosophical investigation.

3. Each chapter (excluding the introductory, one intermediate, and the concluding chapter) are, predictably, labeled by ‘inning’, there being nine such chapters. Thus, when I refer to chapter numbers here, I am referring to the corresponding ‘inning’ number.

4. Cf. the second speech of Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Accessible online at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schleiermach/religion.iii.ii.html.

5. Of course, this is perhaps exactly the kind of charge one might expect a fan of a small baseball franchise to make toward a representative of the perceived hegemony of the New York Yankees. All jabs in this review, however, are meant in good fun.

6. I am particularly heartened by Sexton’s mention (and detailed discussion) of W.P. Kinsella’s Iowa Baseball Confederacy, one of the finest baseball novels ever written and a moving fictional expression of the religious in baseball.

7. Cf. Otto, R. The Idea of the Holy, Ch. 3. Accessible online at: https://archive.org/stream/theideaoftheholy00ottouoft/theideaoftheholy00ottouoft_djvu.txt.