Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

A love letter to America's most beloved sport and an exploration of the deeper dimensions it reveals

For more than a decade, New York University President John Sexton has used baseball to illustrate the elements of a spiritual life in a wildly popular course at NYU. Using some of the great works of baseball fiction as well as the actual game's fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals—from the long-sought triumph of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, to the heroic achievements of players like the saintly Christy Mathewson and the sinful Ty Cobb, to the loving intimacy of a game of catch between a father and son—Sexton teaches that through the game we can touch the spiritual dimension of life.

Baseball as a Road to God is about the elements of our lives that lie beyond what can be captured in words alone—ineffable truths that we know by experience rather than by logic or analysis. Applying to the secular activity of baseball a form of inquiry usually reserved for the study of religion, Sexton reveals a surprising amount of common ground between the game and what we all recognize as religion: sacred places and time, faith and doubt, blessings and curses, and more.

In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, this book elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to a deeper and more meaningful life.

John Sexton is the fifteenth President of New York University; prior to being designated as the university's president in 2001, he served as Dean of the NYU School of Law for 14 years. President Sexton is past Chair of the American Council on Education, the New York Academy of Sciences and the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities of New York. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has served as the Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He received a Ph.D. in History of American Religion from Fordham University, a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and has 10 honorary doctorates, including one from the oldest Catholic University in the world, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In addition to his executive duties as President of NYU, he teaches four full courses each academic year, making him one of the only university presidents to teach a full faculty schedule.

Thomas Oliphant was a columnist for The Boston Globe for more than forty years and is a New York Times bestselling author. He has been part of the "Baseball as a Road to God" seminar for years. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Peter J. Schwartz is a Bloomberg News contributor, former reporter at Forbes and legal fellow at NYU. He was the first student ever enrolled in the "Baseball as a Road to God" seminar. He lives in New York City.