There are a number of baseball players who live out a profound faith. There are also people of faith who love the game of baseball. To find people who understand the nuances of the game of baseball through a framework of theology is unique. A Theologian and a Baseball Fan: What Could Go Wrong? explores aspects of the game of baseball that evoke images from biblical stories and theological themes. Using a theological framework to analyze the game of baseball provides a much more interesting, if not deeper, experience of the game. It is much more than a game from this perspective. It is much more than life. Baseball becomes a reflection of the deepest meaning of life. Both baseball and faith can be described as journeys. The journey of faith begins in the wilderness as we pursue the call of God in our lives. The journey of baseball comes on two levels--one as a player striving to become a major leaguer and two as a fan whose love of baseball may be generational or dream inspired or both. We begin with the journeys of faith and baseball in section 1. Section 2 looks at the social and cultural context of faith and baseball. Both have experienced and initiated social change. Section 3 identifies how baseball and faith deal with rule breakers or sinners. Section 4 shows the relationship between baseball and faith in their unusual personalities and goals of perfection. Section 5 is a potpourri of theological images that can be found in baseball. Finally, any theological discussion requires consideration of sacrament. Maybe surprisingly, there are sacramental images in baseball. On one level, A Theologian and a Baseball Fan: What Could Go Wrong? is an autobiography of Dan Flanagan. He traces how he was first introduced to baseball through his playing days and into his professional involvement in broadcasting, which gave him access to major league baseball in a way he was unable to achieve as a player. His multiple universes of interest come together in this book. His years of biblical teaching is evident. The breadth of his reading adds interest. His years of playing the game provides a flavor of legitimacy of one who knows the game of baseball. A Theologian and a Baseball Fan: What Could Go Wrong? will challenge you and entertain you as a baseball fan and as a person of faith. It will expand your love of both!

There are a number of baseball players who live out a profound faith. There are also people of faith who love the game of baseball. To find people who understand the nuances of the game of baseball through a framework of theology is unique. A Theologian and a Baseball Fan: What Could Go Wrong? explores aspects of the game of baseball that evoke images from biblical stories and theological themes. Using a theological framework to analyze the game of baseball provides a much more interesting, if not deeper, experience of the game. It is much more than a game from this perspective. It is much more than life. Baseball becomes a reflection of the deepest meaning of life. Both baseball and faith can be described as journeys. The journey of faith begins in the wilderness as we pursue the call of God in our lives. The journey of baseball comes on two levels--one as a player striving to become a major leaguer and two as a fan whose love of baseball may be generational or dream inspired or both. We begin with the journeys of faith and baseball in section 1. Section 2 looks at the social and cultural context of faith and baseball. Both have experienced and initiated social change. Section 3 identifies how baseball and faith deal with rule breakers or sinners. Section 4 shows the relationship between baseball and faith in their unusual personalities and goals of perfection. Section 5 is a potpourri of theological images that can be found in baseball. Finally, any theological discussion requires consideration of sacrament. Maybe surprisingly, there are sacramental images in baseball. On one level, A Theologian and a Baseball Fan: What Could Go Wrong? is an autobiography of Dan Flanagan. He traces how he was first introduced to baseball through his playing days and into his professional involvement in broadcasting, which gave him access to major league baseball in a way he was unable to achieve as a player. His multiple universes of interest come together in this book. His years of biblical teaching is evident. The breadth of his reading adds interest. His years of playing the game provides a flavor of legitimacy of one who knows the game of baseball. A Theologian and a Baseball Fan: What Could Go Wrong? will challenge you and entertain you as a baseball fan and as a person of faith. It will expand your love of both!

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.

After identifying early conflicts between churches and baseball in the late-nineteenth century, Price examines the appropriation of baseball by the House of David, an early twentieth-century millennial Protestant community in southern Michigan. Turning then from historic intersections between baseball and religion, two chapters focus on the ways that baseball reelects religious myths. First, the omphalos myth about the origin and ordering of the world is reflected in the rituals and rules of the game. Then the myth of curses is explored in the culture of superstition that underlies the game. At the heart of the book is a sustained argument about how baseball functions as an American civil religion, affirming and sanctifying American identity, especially during periods of national crises such as wars and terrorist attacks. Building on this analysis of baseball as an America's civil religion, two chapters draw upon novels by W. P. Kinsella and David James Duncan to explore the sacramental potential of baseball and to align baseball with apocalyptic possibilities. The final chapter serves as a full confession, interpreting baseball affiliation stories as conversion narratives. In various ways

Laptop Theologian speaks to the spiritual and clinical need in grief recovery. Readings from the 66 books of the Christian Bible are recommended with existential reflections and the Jesus Prayer as sources for healing and guiding persons in grief recovery. In sixty-six days readers may experience restoration to soundness and wholeness on the journey toward healing through various aspects of human loss. Utilizing life experiences, the book provides guidance through the acceptance of death and dying into the assurance of eternal life. Respecting reality of feelings of human loss, readers experience compassion as an ethical choice of care.

Exploring Latin@ theologies and the power of revelation. The Word Became Culture enacts a preferential option for culture, retrieving experiences and expressions from across latinidad as sources of theologizing and acts of resistance to marginalization. Each author in this edited volume demonstrates the many ways in which Latin@ theologies are disruptive, generative, and creative spaces rooted in the richness, struggles, texts, and rituals found at the intersections of faith and culture. With a foreword by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, this book situates Latin@ theologies in the ongoing search for and recognition of the “Word becoming” within the particularities of diverse cultural experiences.

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity, Race, and Sport examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed include: the sanctification of baseball player Jackie Robinson; the domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; religious expressions of athletes in the NFL; treatment of African American tennis player Serena Williams; Colin Kaepernick and his prophetic voice. This accessible and conversational book is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching religion and race or religion and sport for the first time, as well as those working within the sociology of sport, sport studies, history of sport, or philosophy of sport.

Donald K. McKim is former Academic Dean and Professor of Theology at Memphis Theological Seminary. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Theological Turning Points: Major Issues in Christian Thought; Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters; The Westminster Handbook to Reformed Theology; and the Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith.

For more than five decades, pioneering researcher Dorothy Seymour Mills has studied and written about baseball's past. With this groundbreaking book, she turns her attention to the historians, stat hounds, and many thousands of not-so-casual fans whose fascination with the game and its history, like her own, defies easy explanation. As Mills demonstrates, baseball elicits a passion--and inspires a slightly off-kilter, obsessive behavior--that is only slightly less interesting than the people who indulge it.