During Lent this year, my church read and talked about “Sabbath as Resistance” by Walter Brueggemann. Brueggemann, never known for pulling punches, is one America’s leading Old Testament interpreters and has become a fierce social critic of, in his words, the “therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life.” In this short, very readable volume, Brueggemann addresses the role of Sabbath for the people of God and calls for God’s people to take up sabbath as the means to resist the “therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism” that consumes us.
Month: April 2017
An offseason? What’s that?
I’ve nearly finished the first week of my sabbatical leave and I don’t have much to show for it: I’ve deconstructed a falling and failing playground in my backyard, hauled off the underlying mulch, and attended a 2-day university-related meeting with my wife. I haven’t written anything, although I’ve read some. But I feel it’s been a good week.
The Ineffable….
The title of this blog emerges out of a book by John Sexton, Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game, which, in turn, emerged out of course that he taught while president of New York University. Once, an “impious” student told Sexton that his deep love for baseball was silly and the student couldn’t understand why any one would waste time on the game. Sexton took this as a challenge to convert one of the “great unwashed,” and to show that baseball had depth and complexity far beyond innings, hits, and runs. Sexton taught the student through an independent study course and assigned 12 books that would explain how baseball could truly be a road to understanding God. The course was a success and word of mouth spread the good news of this course among other students. Soon enough, Sexton was a teaching one of the most popular courses at NYU which was waitlisted each semester. Sexton’s book is a distillation of the course and his further reflections on baseball and theology.
“In my beginning is my end…”
So begins “East Coker,” the second poem in T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. But this blog is not really about poetry; it’s about one man’s thoughts and musings about sports (particularly, but not exclusively, baseball), theology, and life.
The Ineffable Pastime 