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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

John Sexton: When you get into the real inner self of the true baseball fan, it's even more profound in my view, because with baseball, you withdraw Into this game for two or three hours, and if you're watching it intensely, then you are in this kind of sacred time. Well, that's the way of saying, you know, when we get to play off baseball, everything moves from black and white to technicolor.

There's a greater intensity to it. That, of course, is a quality. of sacred time, of Kairos time, that there's an intensity to it. Now, where does that intensity come from? Because you're noticing, your biology is noticing things that you wouldn't ordinarily notice, especially in the blistering pace of modernity with the, the, the hyper stimulated environment in which most of us live our ordinary lives, Kronos and Kairos time.

you It can be summarized in one word and that is the word liturgy. You're moving into liturgical time and with liturgical time comes a whole set of experiences that are characterized by difference. Another way of saying Kronos and Kairos is to say ordinary and extraordinary or profane

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. For a while when I was nine years old, I had an early morning monastic ritual. School day or weekend, I was up before dawn watching a VHS taped, edited for TV version 

I can still quote large portions of it to this day, and every now and then I just can't help but watch a few scenes.

Based on the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella, it was adapted in 1989 and starred Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones, who died earlier this year. The film's about Ray, a Berkeley grad turned Iowa farmer who hears a voice and plows his acres of corn into a baseball field. He's somewhere between a figure of Noah building the ark, Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, and a symbol of every kid who dreams of baseball, just longing to play catch.

Ray from Field of Dreams (Kevin Costner): Hey, Dad,

wanna play catch? 

Evan Rosa: And as a kid, I just loved the movie. Maybe it wasn't anything more than the fact that I was just born and raised a baseball fan. Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe it's the film's gesturing toward something more. 

Ray from Field of Dreams (Kevin Costner): Ease his pain. Ease his pain? What the hell does that mean? Ease his pain? 

Evan Rosa: Maybe it's the magical realism of it.

Maybe it's the hero's journey.

But something about it captured my nine year old mind.

Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones): The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. 

Evan Rosa: That's James Earl Jones monologue as Terrence Mann. 

Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones): America is ruled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray.

It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.

Evan Rosa: Somehow, baseball was more than a sport, more than a pastime. And more than a ridiculously strange game of confusing rules with all sorts of inexplicable exceptions carried out slowly over an extremely long period of time. I love it. It's ineffable.

It can't be summed up in words. It's hierophantic, a strange manifestation of the sacred in everyday life. It shares in the eternal, or eternal. Infinite. With no game clock, baseball can technically go on forever. Every pitch is a new opportunity, the world reborn with possibility. And it's nostalgic.

Literally a homesickness. It's built around a harrowing odyssey of the batter, leaving home, circling the bases counterclockwise, and a longing struggle to return home. Those four words. Ineffable. Hierophantic. Nostalgic. Infinite. That's your vocab homework, and these are the driving concepts behind today's episode on Baseball as a Road to God.

John Sexton: I have confronted better than you, Evan. I've confronted better than you. That's fine. That's fine. 

Evan Rosa: And that's my guest, and unlikely friend, John Sexton. He's the President Emeritus of New York University, where he's still the Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law. Born and bred as a Brooklyn Catholic, he's an unlikely friend.

Because he's a Yankee fan and I was born outside of Boston into what was, at the time, a hopeless curse of Red Sox fandom. And yes, I wore my Red Sox hat to the interview just to mess with him. 

John Sexton: You just told me that this is a highly volitional act on your part. It is highly volitional. Which was meant solely to stoke controversy.

This is like the Russians interfering with the election. 

Evan Rosa: You know, living in New Haven, we're right on the dividing line between Yankees and Red Sox fans. So, it's, it's, it's a regularity at the local Little League where I'm, I'm very involved. To be clear. I 

John Sexton: mean, again, you revealed a kind of vile part of your essence here because you live on the dividing line.

I invite you 

Evan Rosa: to find your nearest Yankees paraphernalia and get it in the camera. All right. Hold on just a second. Thank you. There it is. There it is. This is perfect. Now, this, this couldn't be better from my perspective. Okay. But by the end of our conversation, he had invited me to join him at one of the final Boston New York games of the season at Yankee stadium.

And in true fashion, the Red Sox lost after a come from behind Aaron judge grand slam. But if you're looking for photographic proof that Red Sox and Yankee fans can coexist, can bridge partisan divides to become friends. You can check the episode page linked in the show notes. For two decades and throughout his college presidency, John has taught a special course at New York University, Baseball as a Road to God, exploring the ineffability, hierophany, nostalgia, and eternity of human and divine life through history, literature, stories, statistics, spectating, and just playing baseball.

In 2013, he authored a best selling book of the same name, Baseball's Road to God, with Thomas Oliphant and Peter Schwartz, and in this episode, we discuss just an innings worth of what baseball means at personal, communal, cultural, moral, and spiritual levels. Thanks for listening, friends. Play ball. 

John Sexton: To be clear, I mean, again, you revealed A kind of vile part of your essence here because you live on the dividing line.

You know, there is in the wonder, the intellectual wonder of the coherence. of Catholic theology. You know, if you have two centuries to think something out, the one thing is true, and that is a lot of really smart people, you know, I mean, Thomas Aquinas was smart. Yeah. And a lot of smart people end up thinking out the doctrinal structure.

And it's wonderful when you step out of that structure, if you know it well, to see how well thought out it is. Once you accept the major premises, the major axioms of the system, it's like Euclidean geometry. Sure. And of course, A big issue for theologians down the ages is how do you, how do you treat the existence of self evidently good people who are not part of the Church, capital T, capital C?

And can they, in fact, be saved and not saved? And what status do they get in the kind of Dante's tripartite world? And so you end up even with a very conservative Pope Pius XII. Right, writing an encyclical called Mystici Corporis, in which he speaks of the church of visible people like me, who self evidently have the gift of sanctifying grace, which just comes, you don't earn it, it comes by virtue of baptism.

Of course, we have the opportunity to be saved, whereas a heathen like you, Evan, who does not have sanctifying grace doesn't have the same opportunity we do. Now, then you get to those good people. And arguably, until we had some time together here, I thought of you as potentially being among those good people.

It's now I'm discovering these vile qualities that you have. But you don't have the excuse, because you grew up in New Haven, of being among, quote, the invincibly ignorant, close quote, those who don't have the opportunity to embrace 

Evan Rosa: the true faith. You were, you're right there. Except part of my baseball story really is where I did grow up.

I was born outside of Boston, and when I was six, My folks moved us to San Diego. So I grew up in the nineties when it was not popular to be a Red Sox fan as a diehard, just a diehard Red Sox fan in San Diego. And no one else rooted for the Red Sox. And I grew up going to Padres games and loving Tony Gwynn.

But to your point, Red Sox fans have been through purgatory and have come out the other side. 

John Sexton: No, that's not true at all. The Red Sox fans invented. Their victimization when Shaughnessy wrote the column on, on, on the first, it was made up post facto 50 years after the alleged accursed act by, by a, of course, I have to say, cause my wife's family's from Boston, as is my beloved brother in law.

Good. I'm obviously being satirical and facetious. I know, but the way I tell this in the narrative is that the Red Sox fans are Appropriated the language of victimization. Yeah. For example, the good people of Brooklyn really earned, you know, that we seem to be cursed, but how did we respond to the good people of Brooklyn with one of the great virtues, the virtue of hope.

Wait till next year, wait till next year. You know, or, you know, you take the, the people of Chicago. Who suffered for a century. Yeah. Right. But you know, if they come from a city that calls itself the second city, you know, the primacy of New York city. Totally. So how did they respond? They responded with resignation, you know, great t shirts, you know, what did Christ say?

to the Cubs as he rose into heaven. And the answer is don't do anything till I get back. And then the other great t shirt, which is, you know, anybody can have a bad century. Shaughnessy writes this column in the seventies. You know, in the face of such virtue, and it's a self pitying, solipsistic, wallowing, hearse, and damnation, you know, 

Ray from Field of Dreams (Kevin Costner): by a people who just, you know, responded with 25 cabs.

Evan Rosa: I do appreciate the point that you make in the book, you know, there was no curse. He just sucked for 85 years. 

John Sexton: Right. Right. And by contrast, the people of Philadelphia, who also had a bad century,

Ray from Field of Dreams (Kevin Costner): they never used the word curse. There was no curse. They just said, we 

Evan Rosa: got all these teams. But it's fascinating how that curse language gets to very quickly, and I think it was, it's fitting to start here.

It gets your point about the proximity, the analogy between baseball and religion or spirituality or maybe magic. There is 

John Sexton: this notion of whether you call it the chosen and you know, how do you deal with the chosen in an ecumenical world? Whether it's. Catholics claiming, as I was taught in the 1950s, by a man named Daniel Berrigan, who was the Martin Luther King of the peace movement.

And Danny Berrigan, about a decade before he became the leader of the peace movement, or one of the leaders of the peace movement, wrote four Latin words. On a blackboard in a Jesuit high school in Brooklyn where I was in class with him as a 12 year old, and the Latin words were extra ecclesiam nullus solis, outside the church there's no salvation.

And I went up to him after class, even as a 12 year old, and I said, Father Berrigan, does that mean that my best friend Jerry Epstein can't go to heaven? And he said, John, if you don't baptize him, he won't go to heaven. So there is this, this notion of the chosen. It's not just the Jewish people that see themselves as chosen.

And they wrestle with it. The great Jonathan Sachs said, we're chosen for special duty. They're not chosen as better than anybody, but But Catholicism and other religions that say they have the truth, capital T, wrestle with that. So this, you know, it is the analogy, you know, we fight crusades, you know, at least in baseball, we don't kill people 

Evan Rosa: over it, at least not yet.

And I think there's a kind of different metaphor. I mean, this is about sports in general, of course, but there are particularities to different sports. And I think baseball has this Has a system or of language or in metaphor that does offer a different kind of description of the struggle than say football where the metaphor is war and battle.

And you get a ton of that kind of language. It is more destructive. It is more violent in that sense. Listen, 

John Sexton: there's a way in which my book is an argument against exceptionalism and triumphalism. So it took me a lot of intellectual struggle. With Tom and Peter, Tom Oliphant, of course, from Boston and Peter Schwartz, who was a student in the first class, and they didn't get at first why I was so insistent on the title being baseball as a road to God, not the road to God.

So I'm not going to make a triumphalist argument. I'll only talk phenomenologically about the qualities I see in baseball. And one of the qualities that is relevant to what you just said, comparing it to football, is that For those who take it seriously, and of course this is true in religion too, there are people who are only inside a church for their own baptism, their own first communion, the last rites, and maybe their wedding, you know, those are the four times in their life, right?

They're never seen in church again. So I'm not talking about, but those of us that really get into it. in a way that people really get into the martial sport of football. Just using one other example, by contrast, digs into our inner selves, call it our souls if you want, because it's so opaque at the first level to the casual fan.

Right. That Much of the action is going on, for example, between pitches. Yeah, I love that. You know, for the true fan, if you're not an aggressive noticer that notices the, where the players are positioned, or that notices where the wind is blowing or how tall the grass in the infield is, or all of those minutia that people associate with baseball being border.

You know, then you're not getting it. It's like a yoga almost. It's like a meditative, contemplative life. It's almost like becoming a monk. 

Evan Rosa: It is the contemplative sport and attention is so important to it. And I think this is the moment then where I want to kind of go into baseball is the philosophical sport.

It's the spiritual sport. It's and then of course you can always any individual athlete can bring those dimensions to their game. But baseball is kind of built in this interesting way and the way that it's structured allows for that. And honestly, like there's just so much that we could get into here, but I want to focus on like attention and contemplation and time.

And I think like this is maybe like a starting point because. So many people who don't understand baseball, who hate baseball, one of the first, I mean, you just said it. One of the first things they go to is boredom in the sense it's such a boring sport. And look at how the major leagues recently caved, added the pitching clock, tried to speed up the game.

And there can be virtues to that. It's more exciting. It's going to keep the game more interesting to, to new people and kind of keep the sport going for longer, perhaps, but it's worth it. appreciating all of that time between pitches and the fact that there is no clock, that it could potentially go on forever.

I'm thinking of this, this 30 for 30 podcast episode about the longest game in history. It's a minor league game. Between Spawtucket and Rochester, and Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs are both in this game. The game ends up, spoiler alert, games end up going 33 innings due to a very strange rule that they couldn't call the game at midnight, and then they had to stop the game at 6am when the sun came up the next day on Easter morning, and they had to pick up the game months later to finish it.

And the game ended two to one with Pawtucket winning out. And that's like, there's so much just in that, that the kind of attention demands. That baseball makes on a player and on a fan is really fascinating. 

John Sexton: Well, yes, and I, uh, if this were a Supreme Court case and you were writing the majority opinion the way you wrote it, I would write not a dissenting opinion, but a concurring opinion.

And I would want to differentiate from some of the things you said in ways that were important enough that I would take some words and write a concurring opinion. Please do. And specifically, I want to make clear that it's my view at least that baseball, even with the new rules, maintains its timeless quality.

The 33 inning game could still occur with the present rules. As to the clock. I think that The Clark rules, it seems to me, don't in any way diminish the contemplative aspect and the action between the pitches and so forth. They actually cut out what might have been kind of distractive stuff like the habits that players got into with their gloves and batting and so forth and so on.

So. I mean, people can disagree about the new rules. I have to support the two I've mentioned, but I don't think they in any way undermine the contemplative nature of the sport. 

Evan Rosa: I agree. And like I said, I find utility in it. I think that it's important utility for the overall sustainability and plausibility of baseball.

John Sexton: You get people into church with the music at first, but before you know it, they're 

Evan Rosa: taking the Eucharist. That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. That's right. But I want to talk about that timeless quality apart from contemporary rule shifts. The timeless quality is amazing. I mean, you make the point in the book, I had never thought about this before that, you know, the decision, for instance, to run counterclockwise, right?

Like what a beautiful metaphor for what baseball can do. And I, and so I want to kind of get you waxing a little bit about, you know, going against the clock. There is this distinction, a Greek distinction. It's often used in theological circles, the difference between. Crognos time and Kairos time. Baseball being more of the latter, Kairos time.

Kind of the fullness of a moment as opposed to the incremental moment by moment ticking of a clock. And I think the absence of the overall game clock and the capacity for the game to go forever to be an infinite game to kind of play. to borrow from James Carse and Infinite Games. There's a beauty to that.

There is a space to occupy, even if it's just finding eternity in a moment, that being on a baseball field or being in a stadium, being at a little league field, playing catch just does to somebody. And there's that timeless quality. I really would love to hear more from you on what draws you to that.

John Sexton: Right, so, well, first of all, the tip of my Yankee hat and the invisible, this gets us to another subject, Brooklyn Dodger hat that emanates around it. But with the tip of that in the direction of Bachi Abadi, he's written beautifully about this. Yes. And if one wanted to penetrate the subject we're talking about by reading one novel, which I love to do with my students in the course based on the book and my own book, the one novel, of course, is the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, where Kinsella, you know, out there in Iowa, goes to a spot outside of the town and at the railroad track slips through a time warp and ends up in a game that, of course, is played for 40 days and 40 nights.

And it's quite apocalyptic. And it just, it has all of these elements that you're talking about. Now, how do we make that meaningful to folks if they don't have time to read some of those works? This point you make about Kronos and Kairos time, it's known to anyone who thinks about religion seriously. And even to those who simply are in a religious context occasionally, because it can be summarized in one word, and that is the word liturgy.

Yes. You're moving into liturgical time, you know, and with liturgical time comes a whole set of of experiences that are characterized by difference. It's, so there's another way of saying Kronos and Kairos is to say ordinary and extraordinary, or as Marcia Elliott says, profane, and sacred. And all you have to do is think of the High Holy Days, or if you think about Easter, that's special time, and then preceded by something called Lent, which is a period of 40 days of beginning to prepare for Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

So this notion That there's special time and time we treat differently, you know, Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball, in my view, refused to pitch the World Series on Yom Kippur. And then later, in a kind of refrain on that, Sean Green of the Dodgers. refused to play on Yom Kippur, even though in the heat of a pennant race.

And he was arguably at that point, the key position player on the Dodgers. So we are familiar with the notion that when we think about religion of special times, What's interesting is the echoes of that in baseball. You'll frequently hear, especially because we have a pennant race going on right now with the new playoff format and everything, but sometimes you'll hear a broadcaster refer to the atmosphere at a regular season game as being Almost like playoff baseball.

Well, that's the way of saying, you know, when we get to playoff baseball, everything moves from black and white to technicolor. Everything, there's a greater intensity to it. That of course is a quality. of sacred time, of Kairos time, that there's an intensity to it. Now, where does that intensity come from?

Because you're noticing, your biology is noticing things that you wouldn't ordinarily notice, especially in the blistering pace of modernity with the, the, the hyper stimulated environment in which most of us live our ordinary lives. But then we move to That special time, Shabbat, or the High Holy Days.

And, you know, it's sacrilege to be doing the deal on Shabbat. Now, when you get into the real inner self of the true baseball fan, it's even more profound, in my view, because with baseball, you withdraw. into this game for, you know, let's say two or three hours. And if you're watching it intensely, if you're the fan that's actually there for the game, and for that three hours, you're actually in the game, then you are in this kind of sacred time.

And what you're doing is, and it's like a muscle that you have to flex. Yeah, absolutely. Guys. Okay. It doesn't happen to you the first time. My granddaughters love to go to games with me because they say, grandpa, we learned so much when we go to a game with you. Cause I'm constantly talking to them. Do you think the runner will go or not go?

Do you think the next pitch will be a curve or a fastball? Do you think, look at where the fielders are. That tells you something about what is going on in the game, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you're noticing muscle is being developed. And the more you develop it in that time, okay, but you have to set the time as a part as special.

Now we come out, there's a larger message here, which is what is your noticing muscle is not necessarily my noticing muscle. We may not set apart the same thing as being sacred. But these choices, which are parallel. in baseball and in religion are more out of descendancy than they are out of some volitional choice by the person who becomes the fanatic or the fanatic.

Okay. That's what fans are. Yeah. They, they, they are adherence to religion. And the reason that you're wearing a Red Sox hat and I'm wearing a Yankee hat, go to where we were born, to whom we were born, the environment in which we were born, and whatever. They don't come to some truth, although they have tremendous power on us.

Same it is with whether you think that Muhammad's truth is the truth or Jesus's truth is the truth. or Abraham's truth is the truth. And, you know, maybe we should just learn from that, this notion of triumphalism, which then gets translated into power politics and war is more contingent than we realize.

Evan Rosa: And with you and that, that noticing muscle, it does both the work of drawing us back into the contemplative side of things, as well as the skill side of things of cultivating a particular habit. So I did want to like kind of take a moment to just address one thing and kind of ask you about, in the book, you definitely go toward saints and sinners, blessings and curses, but there's a little bit of, and I just wanted to ask you what your thoughts were on this, but when it comes to virtue, Formation or ethics and like just the proliferation of rules that you get in baseball.

You know, you turn to the rule book as a kind of bible, right? Like there, like there are moments when the umpires will break out the holy text and consult the the Great Rule book and decide, right and. This is one aspect that I find to be, especially at the level of coaching. So I coach young kids. I'm, I'm a coach pitch coach.

My son, Ben is now entering junior. Well, he's been in junior majors and now it's kid pitch, but those young kids have an opportunity to cultivate real skill of attention, real skill of character and perseverance. And, and it's, and so I just wanted to ask, you know, this is part and parcel, right? When you look at the history of religion, The cultivation of virtue and the moral codes that come alongside it, there is yet another opportunity to find analogy to baseball.

John Sexton: I agree completely. And I would, I would say that baseball is particularly suited for building notions. Uh, well, there's a word for a play in baseball called sacrifice. Right. Sacrifice fly. Right. There's the youthful out. Yes. Productive outs. Totally. So this notion which, by the way, the companion book to my book, Baseball is the Road to God, is a book.

that I wrote five years later called Standing For Reason. And in a way, they, they are, they combine my view of things. And there, there, there is, and I make this point more directly in Standing For Reason, there, there's been a 30 to 40 year effort at Undermining the faith of Americans in our institutions, you know, starting with the government, then with our churches, then with business, now with universities, even beyond that with courts and elections.

This is an effort to undermine the faith in our institutions and a common effort to undermine any notion of a common wheel and beyond that a notion of sacrifice for the common wheel. Actually, enduring pain In the cause, you will not get credit for actuating because it takes, you know, not just quarter to quarter or year to year or term to term, but it actually takes decades for the seeds to grow.

And by the time they're grown, people may not even remember your name. I began about 15 years ago asking young people, first at NYU, then generally. In all kinds of audiences, have you ever heard of the book Profiles in Courage? Less than 10 percent will have heard of the book. So the whole notion of a profile in courage, of I look down into my open grave, of I sacrifice for the common wheel, all of this is being eroded.

How does that relate to baseball? Well, when you're coaching baseball and notions of sacrifice who are the productive out, or The notion of a team. And then if you can get deep into it, I mean, we are in a badge society. So, you know, I need their favor giving every participant a badge, because one of the things you learn is how to deal with disappointment, how to be resilient, how to, you know, how to fail.

So in baseball, how does this start? There's a comment, there's a team. Not everybody succeeds. The best hitter in baseball failed six times out of 10. Think about that. Now, the best hitter in baseball is down to failing seven times out of 10. And you know, what is a good closer? A good closer can forget the defeat of yesterday and learn from it and build on it.

So resiliency. Okay. And it's not, and I say this as a Yankee fan, when we're dealing with the vast, at the level you're dealing with the coaching. It's about how we play the game virtuously and play it to the best of our ability. It's about personal best, not whether we end up in Williamsport winning the championship.

Yes, it's a disappointment when you get there. It's not, it is not condemnation if you don't get there. And all of this stuff comes at a time when it's most needed in 

Evan Rosa: our society. It really does. Yep. I work with a lot of kids who that time on the baseball field ends up being maybe like some of the most positive attention that they receive, maybe that day, perhaps that week.

And it's an opportunity to be truly on a level playing field with friends. And in our league, there's a ton of diversity. It is one of those struggling, Little leagues where we're not sending a team to States and we're not winning our district these days. However, 1974, I believe Walter Popsmith, Little League of New Haven since an all African American team to Williamsport and they lost to Taiwan in the semis, you know, like there's a history there.

Well, see, 

John Sexton: that's the nice, but now let me add another dimension to this notion of. Well, how time works here? So, so, you know, Elliot Ian's, uh, uh, book that I use most directly is his book, sacred and Profane, which is on this ordinary, extraordinary, uh, dichotomy we talked about. But when he, when he elaborates his ideas, he writes a book called Cosmos and History, the Myth of Eternal Return.

So, so that's a quality. In many dimensions that comes with baseball as well. Baseball, you know, Dara's current Goodwin in her terrific book, Wait Till Next Year, talks about how she became a historian by virtue of, as a young girl, doing the box score of the game so that when her dad got home from work, she could narrate.

the game to him and was her introduction to, in a way, historical research and presentation. Okay. Now my, my dad was an alcoholic and a gambler and he died when I was 16. And many of my virtues, I attribute to the fact that he was also my hero. He was never abusive. I think that's critical. My mother never said a bad word about him.

Even in the 20 years she lived after his death. and, and certainly never during his life. He was our hero. So what do you learn? You learned human beings are not perfect. You learn forgiveness. You learn a belief in rehabilitation. You learn try again. And you learn resiliency, personal resiliency from it.

Okay. So that part of my memory bank with my father is every single morning going over the box scores. of the baseball games. Before I went to serve 630 Mass, before I went out on my paper route, there was 5 to 530. with my dad, who would have gotten up even at times when he couldn't move and gone to the candy store and gotten the daily news and brought home the box scores and had them spread out while I had a little breakfast to go over them with me.

All that was involved with that, because in those days, fathers, it was, you know, fathers and sons weren't as communicative. Parents in general weren't as communicative. So, so this was our communicative device, and we bonded. And he always, the name he had for me was Pal, and he was Pal to me. He wasn't dad, I wasn't son, it was Pal.

And that Pal dom developed in and around base. So there is this quality of the eternal return, which of course is very evocative of religion, which You know, it's, it's what the high holy days are about. It's what East is about. We live liturgically in a cyclical time, the way baseball lives liturgically opening day 

Evan Rosa: to the world series, you know.

And also the all star break, you know, like think about like the mid season all star break or the, you know, as you point out the seventh inning stretch, right. Like there is a, the cycle of it is important. Some 

John Sexton: of them. Our memories that come out of that secularity that go back, you know, what would Koufax be like?

What would Gibson be like if they pitched today? Right. Okay. And, and, but some of them go back to extremely specific personal memories, like those of Doris with her father, or me with my father, or you with your son at 

Evan Rosa: little league and whatever. And with my father, but also my mother, when, You know, she would put on the glove too and play catch with me.

And that's the scene at the end of Field of Dreams. Yep. I was just going to go, because we have to get to Kinsella's Field of Dreams as well. Where were you going to take it? It's just that, that, can we play catch? Right. And that is eternal return. And I just want to point out, like, what we're, the category we're getting into here is the capacity for that, that it's the call and response.

It's the, it's not just an echo that goes off into the distance. It's a back and forth. It's a communication. And it brings that 

John Sexton: time here.

Evan Rosa: Yeah. Totally. So, so 

John Sexton: the Eucharist is the last supper. 

Evan Rosa: Yes. And it is also another eternal return. It's every time it's celebrated. That's right. Yeah. It's, it's a fascinating, again, like it's just vibrant with rich metaphors, which is why like really good baseball writing is, is so profound.

And that's the case with Kinsella. I mean, do you know a better baseball writer? And it's one of the rare books where I think the movie is 

John Sexton: better than the book.

Evan Rosa: Ask you about a few words that, that you use. You point out hierophany, which is, I believe the kind of like a, like a sort of sacred instance, like a kind of manifestation of the sacred in otherwise normal mundane life. But you also talk about ineffability. And the inability to express certain things in words, that it's a sort of like experience, experiential requirement in order to, to come to some sort of knowledge of it.

I want to add another word that you don't, I mean, like you use, it's an important word. We've already been there a little bit, but I wanted to add. Nostalgia. And of course, we've discussed time already, but nostalgia, this homesickness, this painful longing for home, which you can see how that works in, in baseball, of course, getting the home plate.

I would like to stick on some of Field of Dreams and talk about ineffable hierophany and nostalgia, but what do those words mean to you? 

John Sexton: Yeah. So the two key words. In baseball, as I wrote to God, are hierophany and ineffable. So Evan, you've gone up in my estimation simply by focusing in on that. Both of them are important to the core serious argument of the book, which is, as I said earlier, an argument against religious triumphalism.

And they also are part of a lifelong intellectual struggle or project that I've had around the question of how important, how essential to religion is doctrine, which of course is intellectualization. And so one could use the words hierophany and ineffable, let's put aside nostalgia for the moment, as an antipode to doctrine.

And certainly going a step beyond that along a spectrum as an antipode towards hierarchy and the concentration of. The power of religious pronunciation, which of course, what do you pronounce, but doctrine. So, to the extent you move. And a spectrum in the direction of words like hierophany and ineffable, you're moving away from the, I have the way of saying this, and the way to say it is transubstantiation.

Not trans signification and we will kill you if you say trans signification and intellectualize the experience of the Eucharist that way as opposed to the transubstantiation Aristotelian domestic way. Mm-Hmm. . So the first word we get to is ineffable. Abram Heschel says that there is the known, okay? So the known, that's what's taught at places like Amherst, and Williams, and Swarthmore, and Haverford.

You don't expect the people in the classroom to be creating the known. generation of ideas. But you expect them to be up on everything that's known and use that to teach critical thinking and the canon of what is known. Then the next thing Heschel says is the knowable but not yet known. And that's the task of the research university, okay, is to discover and push the boundaries of what we can conceptualize, what we can put into words.

And then there is the ineffable. And the ineffable is, is that which just fundamentally can't be put into words. So, so we sometimes have words that signify the ineffable. One such word is love. So I did not persuade Lisa to love me or that I loved her. It was a deeply known fact. It was the driver of our lives and remains that 17 years after her death.

It is not something I can conceptualize. And I can't convince you that you love me. I can't convince you of a certain religious moment in my life being the moment that you should be sharing if you can't share it. And that then brings us to hierophany. And Hierophany, in the Greek, is Hieros, the sacred, Phanos, shining through.

So, so it is whatever in this world causes you to be drawn to the sacred experience. And it's highly contingent. So the example I use first with my students is I put on a picture of Uluru. Okay, because the native Australian is the longest continuous civilization in the world. There are cave paintings in Australia that I've seen that are beyond carbon dating.

They go back 100, 000 years. And Uluru, which the British call Ayers Rock, Uluru is that Mound, you've seen it, I'm sure you're, since I've seen it. It's this huge, I would say about 15 story high, if you want to do it in a Manhattan apartment building. Mound, in the middle of the outback, which is utterly flat.

For as far as you could see in a plane flying for an hour in any direction. Okay. Suddenly there is this, which to the native Australian is Axis Mundi. It's the place where the connection between the sacred and the gods and all that's there connects to this mundane world. Okay. So it is for them a hierophany.

As I look at it. I'm seeing a beautiful geological wonder, and I can understand why it would be evocative, but I don't experience the evocation that my native Australian guide has. Meanwhile, if I decide to take out the host and the chalice To me, the Eucharist connects me experientially with the sacred and the Last Supper and with Christ and all that means.

And for him, we're eating lunch. So this is the contingency of the religious experience that is ineffable. So that's where the word liturgy comes in. So to me, it's the liturgical, not the doctrinal or the hierarchical. or structural, that becomes the essence of the religious experience. Okay, this is, that's the approach through Eliade and Otto and such writers that, that I take to analyze baseball as a religion.

And it leaves you immediately to nostalgia, which is the third word you introduce, because that is the yearning. Eliade calls it the, now here the word myth, We have to pause for a moment, because in this context, the word myth is a very affirmative, positive word. Myth is what captures this liturgical moment, okay?

Because we, we tell stories. We don't tell them for the facts. We tell them to try to express the experience. Eliad has this great example where he's with a village where the annual festival each year involves a couple that was about to be married. And on the night before their wedding, the groom was thrown from a cliff into a ravine and died.

And Elliot got there to study it, and the woman was still alive. And she told him, the guy was coming home along the path on the mountain and was drunk as a skunk, and he fell off the mountain and died. And when Elliot went to the townspeople and said, well, here are the facts, they said, She's an old woman, she just doesn't remember the truth, because they had internalized the myth and the story of the tragedy, the deep tragedy that had befallen this young couple.

So, so nostalgia is an important part of that, and it operates on two dimensions. As we said before, it operates by bringing you back. to the archetypal period, bring the eternal return to that, you know, and, and of course, that is always aspirational. It's where we hope to be, which, which brings in, you know, the aggressive virtue of hope, not the soft, it's only a hope, virtue of hope, but the, we, we really Hope to be, we really believe we can be, you know, it's again, something that we're missing in society.

But sometimes it also brings us back to some very specific memories. It's the myth of eternal return. And that brings us back to that place, which is deep in memory and to which we yearn to go because 

Evan Rosa: it was a place of love. Yeah. Because there's like, I think it's maybe about the experience of baseball.

It's represented, of course, in the striving for home plate, but it's also represented in the extremely long season, the arduous 162 games, it's, you know, the infinite qualities or the potentially infinite qualities of it. And then I think it's great to be landing on hope because it is that kind of hope against hope.

The hope that comes with preseason. And the hope of a fan to a team that, that doesn't have much of a chance that is somehow still believing, right? Somehow still My 

John Sexton: son remembers as an 11 year old after a Yankee defeat, sitting with me in a restaurant called the Brasserie at a booth at about 11 o'clock at night, where we took out the remaining 20 games that the Yankees had to play.

And we won each game and said, do it, whether you would think they'll win this game. And we ended up with them going 18 and two, which would have just gotten them into the playoffs by the skin of their teeth. Everybody knows they're not going 18 and two. We didn't know that in that moment. And was it possible?

Yes. By the way, this is fun. It's very fun. You're not as vile as I would. Thank you.

Did you play Little League? Oh, yeah. In fact, I'm a historic figure in Little League. I am the Jackie Robinson of the B'nai B'rith Little League. I was the first goy. I and Billy Ryan, we went in together, it was like Robinson and Newcomb, and uh, we were the first goy to play in the B'nai B'rith Little League.

Really? That's amazing. And that was in Brooklyn? That was in Brooklyn, yeah. Do you have little league memories? I was a catcher and a very good catcher with a very accurate throwing arm, which is unusual in little league baseball. But even though I was a good hitter, when we played around the neighborhood, I became a specialist kind of foreshadowing Ron Hunt of the Mets and Anthony Rizzo of the Yankees as being hit by pitches.

And so if the statistic, the on base percentage had been created, I would have really been a superstar because I would get managed to get hit by a pitch at 

Evan Rosa: every other time. Well, and Moneyball taught us that on base percentage is really important. 

John Sexton: I understand, but I was ahead of my time. It's all about timing.

Although they did, I think, because I was one of the two Catholic kids. Both of us were named to the all star team, really. And I got to go to a baseball team game as part of it. But I was not good enough to play in high school. I yearned at playing in high school, but I couldn't have won. I became, therefore, a debater, which produced one of my great memories and a friendship, because I was on the third floor.

of my high school. A good 40 feet off the ground, about 325 feet from home plate, when a baseball came through the window that was hit by a senior from St. Francis Prep by the name of Joe Torre. No way. That led to a 

Evan Rosa: lifelong friendship. That's incredible. I, I played catcher a bit. I played first base, center field, and I could hit the ball, but also did not make my high school team.

And I remember feeling conflicted that I had played so much baseball to that point that, you know, other interests, particularly music and surfing growing up in San Diego, I, I, I had kind of lost. Lost a little bit of my first love for baseball, but there was still the pain of not making the high school team and the yearning that was there.

And it was like, I guess that's the end of that. And eternal return, the blessing of that. It wasn't the end of course, but like I gave up on baseball at that point for many years. Really only to truly come back to it when my kids got into it. And it was the, the idea of this passing along and, and playing catch with them and just like developing a love and like the stories, you know, kind of like just living in the stories of it.

But Little League is such a formative and beautiful expression of the sport. 

John Sexton: In writing the book, Baseball is a road to God. I chose the most difficult form of baseball for my argument by choosing professional baseball as opposed to the purity. of Little League, or at least, uh, near purity. There are parents that act out, but the near purity of Little League baseball and 

Evan Rosa: minor league baseball.

Sure. But I mean, if you take the coaches and the parents out of Little League, everyone's having a great time. 

John Sexton: Right. That's good. That's 

Evan Rosa: exactly right. What about your earliest, maybe favorite baseball memory? 

John Sexton: Well, my, my father was for a while. The political boss of Brooklyn. My grandfather had been the political boss of Brooklyn, and the result was that I met Jackie and Rachel Robinson when I was 10 and 11, two, and we had a house at the beach, and the black ballplayers were by and large not welcome at other officials house at the beach.

But my dad and mom welcomed. Robertson and Newcomb and Campanella. We had tickets every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and night game. Night games were rare, so I could go to games. You know, and then we had tickets, about 40 seats up from the third base coach's box. And the memories of being there with my dad and then going in with friends, you know, like on a Saturday afternoon and taking the bus and subway in and then, and then spending the day at the ballpark.

So my Two great heroes other than obviously family. But my two great celebrity heroes in my life were Jackie Robinson and Pete Seeger, both of whom I was blessed with getting to know at a fairly young age. Let's focus here on Jackie, on, on my academic gown. I have the number 42 and I, I was lucky enough to get to meet him and to meet the wonderful Rachel who has a, a PhD.

For not an honorary doctor, she has a PhD in nursing from NYU and is still alive at the age of 102. I saw her just a month ago. So Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers were at a very deep level present for me. And when I think of baseball, I think first of them, I do not recognize the Los Angeles Dodgers. They are schismatic and the Dodgers.

As Jodi Padre said, we'll win the World Series only once. And that was October the 4th, 1955. So the Dodgers are part of the religion of baseball for me. And it was a very intentional decision when my son was born in 1969, which was the Mets miracle year. And the Dodgers were in the West Coast, and there was no such thing as DirecTV, and the games were late anyway.

So being a Dodger fan, or giving him Dodger fandom, was not feasible. And I realized that giving him the teams for which he would root, this was even before I began thinking of him. The book or the course or anything else. But I intuited that giving him the teams for which he rooted was a more important benefaction than giving him.

So he was baptized, went late at Bar Mitzvah. Oh, interesting. But he's still a Yankee fan, and I chose the Yankees. Now, I, I don't know if I could have chosen the Yankees if they were still at the top of the pile. In 1969, they were awful. I mean, the, the highlight of the season was their shortstop, a man by the name of Gene Michael, who later built the great teams in the 90s, perpetrating twice in one season, the hidden ball trick, which I had only seen done until recently in a little league, you know, but in the major leagues, Michael did it twice in one season.

And the Mets were having this miracle year. The 50s Catholic in me chose to get my son the monuments and the hagiography of Ruth and Garrick and, you know, and tradition with a capital T, which is very important to Catholics. So, and then I continued to root for the Koufax, Drysdale, Sutton teams, But when they played the Yankees in the 70s, I couldn't bring myself to root against my son's team.

So I converted. 

Evan Rosa: I've just got a couple, a few more here. I wonder if you could just give me a tiny bit more on The significance of Jackie Robinson, just at the racial level, you know, baseball has, along with the rest of America and the rest of Christianity, I'd say a very sordid and, and sadly compromised history.

with respect to race. 

John Sexton: So just last night in class, there was a class on the first amendment religion clauses. And the first important case in that area was decided in 1947. And I looked at this class of young people. I said, now, why is 1947 one of the most important years in the history of the world? And they looked at me with puzzlement.

And I said, because that's the year Jackie Robinson. The color line in baseball. And that was a, a huge foreshadowing. Uh, Pete Hamill, by the way, wrote a great novel called Snow in August that triangulates a young Irish boy, but it was obviously Pete as a 12 or 13 year old with a rabbi who's just arrived from Prague and Jackie Robinson.

And it's a wonderful sense of what the world then was like. And Pete would say that. Jackie Robinson made it possible for Martin Luther King to happen. That's how important breaking the color line in baseball was. Because this, this is right after World War II, and you had phenomena like the Tuskegee Airmen, the majority of whom I should say were NYU people, and you had a tremendous integrative force.

When these people become your friends and you're in combat with them in the infantry or the Navy, whatever, there was an integrative force that wasn't sufficient to create a widespread awareness in the Ozzie and Harriet Dwight Eisenhower 50s of the injustices that had been done. But it created a bridge of friendship that was a predicate for when those injustices were pointed out, making the recognition of the injustices greater.

Jackie Robinson and baseball were important elements to that because Jackie and Newcomb and Campanella. I mean, it was a time in 1955 when the starting lineup of the Dodgers was majority black, that five of the nine players were black because by then Amoros had come up and so on. The, there was a self evident, in a core, in a core, of the Civil Religion of America, which you remember baseball was really, football hadn't become a thing yet.

Basketball hadn't become a thing yet. Hockey certainly hadn't become a thing yet, but people united around baseball, you know, as the unique sport was, it was America's game. And the self evident Preclusion that it happened, all that talent that was out there. And then Paige coming back, of course, in his forties, late forties, and still getting out the best white hitters that there were out there.

I mean, there was no denying it. It was like the Jesse Owens moment in the Hitler Olympics, you know, so, so there was a power that came with Jackie. And, of course, critical is the virtue and grace with which he handled it. Now, we talked in a different context about the lack of awareness in our society generally, even among brilliant students that I teach who are going to be leaders of what profiles encourage means, what suffering pain in the cause means.

Well, Jackie was the personification of that. And, I mean, his willingness to subdue the rage that he had. And then the gradual, you know, Pee Wee Reese putting the arm over the shoulder. Pee Wee Reese from Louisville, Kentucky, putting his arm over the shoulder of his teammate, the second baseman in the shortstop.

These were iconic moments that were more catalytic, I think, of The racial justice movement then has generally been appreciated. 

Evan Rosa: Because it occurred on a baseball field and because you're entering almost into this, not just a different like kind of sequence of time or a different expression of time, but sort of this alternate dimension.

John Sexton: It's occurring in the sanctum sanctorum. It's occurring in the most sacred of places. 

Evan Rosa: So, I mean, I just want to, like, You, you, you had a, something like a relationship with Jackie Robinson. 

John Sexton: Uh, you know, it was the kind of relationship that when we reconnected, especially when I reconnected with Rachel, 'cause Jackie was gone and here I was the dean and then the president of NYU.

And one of the first things I did was give Rachel an honorary degree. And then, because I have a liturgical sense and I'm very proud. That NYU is the only university that has its graduation in Yankee Stadium. 

Evan Rosa: I did not know that. 

John Sexton: The president confers the honorary degrees, essentially a second base, and it occurred to me in my last year as president that the greatest relief pitcher of all time, but also the last person to wear the number 42.

had just retired. So when at the 50th anniversary of Jackie's breaking in in 1997, as you know, baseball retired the number 42 in all of baseball. So nobody will ever wear the number 42 again, except liturgically on every April 15th, which is April 14th, 1947 is the day that Jackie broke into baseball. And every year on April 15th, everybody in baseball wears the number 42.

It is on a, but when that happened in 1997, when they retired the number, there were three players that had the number 42 that were grandfathered in and two of them were journeymen. Third, thankfully, who outlasted the two was the greatest rebeat pitcher in the history of baseball, Mariano Rivera. Uh, yeah.

So it's fitting. So, so in my last year as president. On second base at Yankee Stadium, we conferred an honorary degree on Mariano, but the hooding was done by Rachel. So that gives you a kind of liturgical, because if you think about it, what is graduation but a sacrament? Right. It is, it is a hierophantic moment.

It's creating memories for the students, you know, and how do you do that? You know, well, you know, some years you had Taylor Swift come and speak and some years you have Mariana Rivera hooded by Rachel Robbins. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. I like that also that the, that you're being, you're conferred the degree at second base, not home plate, right?

You're on, you're only ever on the way. You might be, you might be in scoring position, but, but you're not, you know, you're not done. You're not done at all. 

John Sexton: Yeah, 

Evan Rosa: that's 

John Sexton: exactly right.

Evan Rosa: At the level of baseball and the role it plays in a life worth living, I want to ask you both personally and then with respect to baseball, what is a life worth living? 

John Sexton: So this is going to go in a direction I don't think you're aware it will go. For my 80th birthday. Two years ago, the Klan convened and we went into the Grand Canyon for 19 days.

And I came out of the Grand Canyon and, uh, because, uh, a year and a half earlier, I had gone through getting a rare cancer, which is eye cancer, which had been, everybody thought, treated well.

Consequently, I had to have MRIs every quarter. to see if it had spread because it's a very aggressive cancer. And I came out of the Grand Canyon, went for one of these MRIs and was told that I had stage four liver and brain cancer, 30 tumors, and that I had four to six months to live. And it was a moment where the doctors attempted to begin helping me through this difficult period.

And, uh,

After an hour, they realized how eccentric the being was. with which they were dealing because I, I said to them, really, this is wonderful. And they said, well, isn't there a relationship you want to repair or announce? And I said, I said, I've lived this unbelievably blessed and open life. And you know, I just, there's nothing.

Now I did, after they pressed it, pressed it, pressed it. Is it okay if for the next four months I end each day eating a pint of ice cream? And they said, of course, yes. And as a result, I gained 40 pounds. I call it the dying period. I, I now can do an hour and a half stand up comedy on it. It was glorious. It was absolutely wonderful.

It was, it was, it was technicolor and it was, you know, intense and all the friends you care about. But you just assume you're going to see them, make a point of coming to see you. You know, and, you know, and I, it was just absolutely one of my, my, the one granddaughter who was not in the city, moved in as my roommate down the hall and transferred colleges to NYU.

My daughter moved back from the West Coast and it was all just wonderful, you know? And then, uh, a few days ago, a friend asked me how I was feeling, because it's obviously, you know, Two years later. Yeah. You're not dead yet. And I said, I'm feeling mortified. And then I realized the Latin root of the word mortified.

And I said, well, I was due for mortification, but I didn't mortify in a timely way. Now I'm kind of embarrassed. And one of my friends, the former school chancellor, Joel Klein, we were out to the theater about a year ago when it went clear. I hadn't died. And the doctors were just baffled. They can't. figure out why.

I mean, the 32 of us are alive and they clower out at the MRIs I have every two months and they haven't grown or shrunk in two years. My goodness. No, I would be on data. And Joel took me by the shoulders. He said, section, I'm going to have the courage to tell you something. None of your other friends are going to tell you.

Once in your life, you, you get to tell your friends and family, you've got four to six months to live. You've used your once. If the doctor's telling you again, don't mention it. Just die. We've all said everything. Interesting. One of my granddaughters, who's a film student, made a short. She had to make a short.

And this is during the dying period. And she went back to a game we had made up out of a Kinsella short story. And the game was, and we would play it on the river in calm waters when you're just rowing or whatever. Suppose that part of the anatomy of evolution was that six months before you were going to die, your little toe fell off.

So you knew you were on the clock. What, if anything, would you do differently during those six months? Okay. Is there someone you would profess your love? Is there someone you'd repair your relationship? Is there a place you'd want to go? And then if there is something you would do differently, why are you waiting?

Why would you wait till the last six months? Now, if you've lived your life to be. As useful as you can be, right? That's what the Jesuits taught us. A life for others, a useful life, a life of joy, not happiness, right? Maybe you have happiness, but the key thing is joy in producing in others. So I made up this word, possibilitarian, to describe.

And if you ask me what kind of life to lead, such that when you come to a moment where you're told You have 46 months to live and you can accept it joyfully and just enjoy and say to the doctors, look, I'm not interested in longevity. Whatever treatment you want to give me, I do not want it to affect my ability to live the life I'm leading.

So every Tuesday I go for my infusions and gene therapy, but it's not the kind of treatment that causes me to be ill. I'm a little more tired than usual. I can't go in the sun as much. But, uh, other than that, you know, I'm teaching a full schedule and enjoying my children and grandchildren and about to head off on a polar bear safari.

And, you know, so you just, I think the key is not waiting to those last six months and just using your talent. If you're blessed, you know, as I said to my students last night, everyone in this room, even you, The Red Sox fan. Not every human being is blessed with what we've been blessed with, but we've been blessed by a gift.

Call it a grace if you want, and that is we were born smart. So if you're blessed with that gift and you're blessed with that gift in a place where it makes a difference. I mean, there are 40 million children in the world that do a lot of work now with refugees and displaced kids, 40 million school aged kids in the world that won't meet a teacher for one day in their whole lives.

Another 350 million can't get past the fourth grade, no matter how smart they are. So here we are at Yale and NYU, and we've been given that double gift, and we damn well better use it well. And if you live that kind of life, and there's a way in which baseball teaches you that, to bring it back to baseball, because you can have the gifts.

There are players we know who had the gift, who just wanted it and never became what they could become. Maybe they became very good players some of them, some of them didn't make it. I mean, think of this, the tragedy of this gifted Picture that the Yankees had Hermann, who just squandered his talent in a dark place.

And that's just one example from the last five years on the team I root for. So treat, dear, treat, get the things done that you would get done in that 

Evan Rosa: last six months. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time. I'm delighted to have met you, John. I'm delighted to have met you too. Yeah, you're good. 

John Sexton: I like you. I hope we can meet in person sometime.

I hope so too. Maybe we'll go to a game. You want to go to a game together? I'd go to a game. Okay. So you just, I have, I have to tell you, I've never been 

Evan Rosa: to Yankee Stadium. 

John Sexton: Okay. So hold on a second because I don't bullshit. 

Evan Rosa: Okay. And he really doesn't. John did take me out to the ballgame, and you can find a rare picture of a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan just enjoying the game together in the show notes for today's episode.

And thanks for listening today. But before wrapping this episode, I feel like I just need to offer a few shoutouts. Baseball is important to me, and in doing this interview and episode at this phase of life, it just brought up so many memories, so many faces, and maybe you've got a baseball or softball memory of your own to be grateful for.

So, to Oceanside American Little League in San Diego where I grew up playing, and New Haven's Walter Pop Smith Little League where I coach, and to Nick who sat on the bench with me, and to Chris who threw a fastball that ended up over the fence even when he knew I couldn't hit a curve, to Mom for the rides and snacks and just constant support, to Dad for introducing the game and never saying no to playing catch, to Kyle for just being there and rooting for the Padres with me.

And to Lainey, Nan, Lux, Ben, and Gus, my team, for backyard wiffle ball, stadium visits, hot dogs and sunflower seeds, and making baseball the perfect game. Life

of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured John Sexton. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa, and when I'm not editing or producing the show, I'm coaching Little League, obsessing over how to teach kids baseball and analyzing throwing and batting mechanics.

For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. We can find all sorts of resources to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the show, remember to hit subscribe. And if you're a loyal supporter, a faithful listener, please consider telling a friend or sharing an episode.

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