From The New York Times, “Baseball as a Road to God:”
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.”
And if you plan to be in Los Angeles June 15
received via email:
The Rev Canon Susan Russell writes:
BREAKING NEWS:
Dio L.A. Dodger Night is June 15: Dodgers vs. White Sox AND Bishop Glasspool may get to throw the first pitch if enough tickets are sold! Tickets are $15 each and must be purchased by May 18 through Dodger Night coordinators at individual congregations. For information contact the Rev. Canon Greg Larkin, Dodger Night coordinator. Let’s get behind this and get Bishop Glasspool out there to throw out the first pitch!! GO BLUE!!