Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

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.

John Sexton is the fifteenth president of New York University. He lives in New York City.

Thomas Oliphant was a columnist for The Boston Globe and is a New York Times bestselling author. He lives in Washington, DC.

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