Dying Breed Dialogues: John Sexton on Baseball as a Way to God

The ineffable in America's pastime, the spiritual arithmetic of failure, and the most Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish part of the game

John Sexton is a man who has lived many lives: former NYU president, constitutional scholar, baseball devotee, and Catholic thinker who married into a Jewish family. His book Baseball as a Road to God emerged from a course he taught for 25 years, exploring the spiritual dimensions of America's pastime. At 82, Sexton speaks with the wisdom of someone who was told three years ago that he had four months to live due to stage four liver and brain cancer. As he said before our conversation: "I'm literally a dying breed!"

But he's still here, still teaching law at NYU, still cheering on his Yankees, and still finding the sacred in the rhythms of the diamond. His insights into the transcendent offer a unique lens for understanding both spirituality and baseball.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You begin your book talking about the "ineffable" as part of both baseball and religious life. What do you mean by the ineffable?

There is the known — what liberal arts colleges teach. Then there's the knowable, but not yet known — what research universities do, the constant discovery. And then comes this third category, as Heschel says, which is the ineffable — beyond expression in our cognitive terms. It's just beyond our comprehension in that literal way of putting it into thoughts.

It's the hundredth name of Allah. It's what the mystics speak of in all developed religions. It's something that's experienced when you listen to the "Going Home" interlude in Dvořák's "New World Symphony" or the coda in Tchaikovsky's Fifth. It is most definitely what, if you're blessed in your life with an "I-Thou" love affair, you feel in that space where there's something beyond you that you can't comprehend or put into concepts.

When you move it to baseball, it's the moment when the revelation happens — with Willie Mays' catch, if you're a Giants fan, or Aaron Boone's home run, if you're a Yankees fan. It's experiential knowledge, as Aristotle would call it, and it's something that takes us beyond to another dimension.

When was the first time you experienced the ineffable with baseball?