'Baseball As A Road To God'

John Sexton is a life-long baseball fan, a devout Catholic and a serious academic — after all, he's the president of New York University. These three passions converge in a course Sexton teaches called "Baseball as a Road to God." He's now written a book of the same title with former Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant and the very first student to ever enroll in the course, Peter J. Schwartz.

John Sexton, president of New York University and co-author of "Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game."

Slate, "Play a game. Play in the street. Scuff a ball. Go for breakfast when your team loses. Long for home. And be rescued by baseball from one more bad day. It’s a generously long season. Our long winter is nearly done. We’ve all got a lot to look forward to. So live slow. Because it will all, all of it, go by so, so fast."

The New York Times, "The real idea of the course is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being."