Baseball Has Its Worshipers, and at N.Y.U., You Get Credit

[cbayer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/us/from-baseball-insight-into-god-at-new-york-university.html?_r=2&hpw



By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: April 20, 2012


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.”
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Around Dr. Sexton sat 18 undergraduates, some religious and some not, some bleacher diehards and some not, all of them enrolled in a course titled “Baseball as a Road to God.” It is the sort of course in which the teaching assistants go by the angelic designation “Celestials” and discussion sections are named for Derek Jeter and Willie Mays among other diamond luminaries.

As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.

“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.”

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[HooptieWagon]

1. I think offering majors in baseball, football, etc is a good idea.

There are majors in dance, theatre, sax performance, etc... why not offer majors in an individual sport? It would eliminate the charade of athletes majoring in business or sanskrit. Maybe theyd stay in school longer and complete their degree... Its worth considering.