As an avid baseball fan, I regret reporting my view that a
recent Christian Century column is over the top, but that does not prevent it
from being great fun. The column reports on Rick Warren’s “Sermon on the Mound”
on Easter Sunday in the Angels home ballpark. And it cites Annie Savoy’s poetic “statement in the 1988 film Bull Durham, ‘The only church that feeds
the soul, day in and day out, is the church of baseball.’ The well-known
theologian Stanley Hauerwas, a fellow fan of the Durham Bulls, has written that
‘there are few things better that Christians can do in and for America than
play and watch baseball.’
Those statements cannot be outdone,
but theologian William Herzog takes a stab at it: “[Baseball] doesn't feed the
hungry, or care for the sick, or settle disputes between warring nations. And
yet, he says, there is something ineffably stirring and nearly transcendent
about sitting in Boston's Fenway Park and seeing the outfield where great
players once roamed—the ‘great cloud of witnesses,’ or ‘communion of saints,’
if you will.”
I understand Herzog’s point, but it
is hard to ignore that Boston’s ticket prices have become a testimony to the
corporate materialism of our age. Even if we forget Boston’s lamentable history of
racism, it is hard to get behind a franchise when the best thing that can be
said on its behalf is that it is not the New York Yankees.
Life is more like a baseball season.
Posted by: Retro Jordans | 08/09/2010 at 06:18 PM