Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week than he or she otherwise would be, because of it....


It looks like Mark Wahlberg has done some good for the country because of, among other things, his making religion a part of his life:

Mark Wahlberg to Alexandria students: Stay in school

By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: April 24

Mark Wahlberg, one of the world’s most successful high school dropouts, stopped by T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria on Wednesday morning to encourage students to stay in school.

The multimillionaire Hollywood producer, actor, former rapper and model dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. But now, the 41-year-old father of four is pursuing his diploma through an online credit-recovery program.

“If my career goes south, I’m working at McDonald’s. I’m driving a tow truck,” he told the students. “That’s why I’m going back to high school.”

T.C. Williams has been working aggressively to improve its graduation rate since 2010, when it was labeled one of the nation’s persistently lowest-achieving schools and given federal funding to improve.

In 2009, 78 percent of students graduated from T.C. Williams in four years, compared with 83 percent across Virginia. Just 65 percent of Hispanic students graduated in the same time. By the 2012-13 school year, the overall on-time graduation rate increased to 82 percent — and 70 percent for Hispanic students.

School officials said the improved graduation rates are the result of a much larger team of school counselors working closely with students to develop personal academic and career goals and helping them follow through.

“They know these children inside and out, their families, their social histories and academic performance,” said Gregory Forbes, director of secondary school counseling. “Truly, no student is slipping through the cracks.”

Alexandria, like a growing number of school districts, is also beginning to offer more online courses to help students at risk of dropping out pursue their degree on a faster or more flexible timeline. The city’s high school opened a satellite campus in the fall at Landmark Mall, where students can follow a computer-based curriculum at their own pace.

Officials say the flexibility is crucial for students who have to work, take care of children or have other complications in their personal lives.

Wahlberg set out to pursue his own degree through a similar program. He enrolled in an accelerated online program at Snowden International High School, formerly Copley Square High School, where he would have graduated in 1988, according to Gina Alfonseca, a spokeswoman for Boston Public Schools.

Snowden’s headmaster invited Wahlberg to finish his diploma there after reading in a celebrity magazine that he regretted dropping out, Alfonseca said.

Since then, Wahlberg has become a spokesman for staying in school. He visited T.C. Williams after the school won a national contest.

A DJ transformed the early morning assembly into a nightclub, with blasting music and 1,100 students’ hands and cellphones swaying in the air. Wahlberg greeted a shrieking audience. He flirted with Principal Suzanne Maxey and, with cameras rolling, told the students about his rocky adolescence in a rough Boston neighborhood.

He was one of nine children. He ran around with a street gang and clashed with the law.

“We thought we were having fun drinking and getting high,” Wahlberg said. But the story did not end well for everyone.

“Most of my friends are incarcerated,” he said. “This is a much nicer place to be.”

After he served time for an assault charge at 16, he decided to change his life. He started going to church and found a passion for music and, later, acting, he told the students.

Wahlberg was scheduled to visit the White House with a student and college counselor later Wednesday to speak with an adviser about the importance of improving graduation rates, an Alexandria schools spokesman said.

Hendrik Enriquez, 18, said Wahlberg’s message was helpful. “High school gets tired sometimes,” he said.

Three of Enriquez’s friends dropped out of high school, but he said he plans to go to college.

By Sohrab Ahmari

Leon Kass was born in Chicago in 1939 to a family of Jewish immigrants. His childhood home was "Yiddish-speaking, nonreligious, lower middle class." At age 15, he was admitted to the University of Chicago where, he recalls, "I did very well on my science placement tests so my adviser made me a science major."

He entered University of Chicago's School of Medicine upon graduation, but not before "acquiring a prejudice in favor of reading old books slowly, a certain taste for philosophical questions, and a keen interest in liberal education."

While he was a medical student, he met and married his wife of nearly 52 years, the classics scholar Amy Kass. The couple went on to Boston, where he completed an internal-medicine internship and earned a biochemistry Ph.D. at Harvard.

"A funny thing happened to me in graduate school," he recalls. "My wife and I spent part of the summer of 1965 in Mississippi doing civil-rights work." The couple lived with a black farmer in Mount Olive, Miss., in a home that had no toilet or indoor plumbing. "I came back from this place with this conundrum: Why was there more honor, goodness and decency in these unschooled black farmers than I found in my fellow graduate students at Harvard, whose enlightened and liberal opinions I shared?"

The answer, he eventually concluded, was that his black hosts displayed "the dignity of honest work and religion"—things he didn't often find among his highly educated peers, most of whom "were only looking out for Number One." 

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week than he or she otherwise would be, because of it....

Americans are having an extremely difficult time getting married and staying married right now. One of the effects of divorce is extreme emotional trauma, for the adults involved but most especially for the children. The distress can be large enough in magnitude and duration that it begins to inhibit the development of the child into a happy and contributing member of society. 

The above picture captures one reason this young man of faith might be a better American because he attends church than he otherwise would be - if his father (or mother, or both) have fled his life, a sweet duo of love and assistance is shown: his loving grandmother and God, both found in the chapel of this church.

The healing power of our churches, temples, synagogues and mosques helps America better endure the tidal wave of failed marriages until we can figure out how to free ourselves from this plague on our nation.

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week than he or she otherwise would be, because of it....

Magen Morse, Purcellville, VA
April 14, 2013


One hot July, when I was nearly fourteen, I volunteered to pay my way to work for a few weeks for the U.S. Forest Service.  Along with the other high school students, we would work in northern Utah clearing brush from trails, picking up trash along the highway, and doing various other projects.  I had answered an ad in the local newspaper, but I soon found out that those of us who volunteered for an adventure were in the minority to those whose parents or parole officers were sending them off as a way to build character and citizenship.  The cheap “Outward Bound” version.  What did I know about character and citizenship at almost 14?  What might have made me want to work hard for no pay during my summer vacation?

Looking back, I think, I had been trained in equal parts idealism and service.  I was an active member of my religious faith, and I had very clear ideas of my moral obligations to myself and others around me.  In my religion community, I had energetic youth leaders who found opportunities for us to serve in a variety of ways:  we cleaned, babysat, did yard work, prepared food, and visited nursing homes.  These leaders found opportunities for us to do lots of other things besides serving  others – we were signed up for contests in 4-H, sent to outdoor, sleep-away girl’s camps, asked to be leaders of the other girls, to speak in front of the congregation during worship services, and to sing (off-key) in small groups for those same gatherings.  

What had already happened for me before I even turned 14 can be boiled down to two ideas:  confidence and opportunity.  All this experience in an accepting environment led to confidence in my abilities.  All this experience and opportunity in a variety of activities showed me that it was possible to participate in the wider world.  Additionally, there was the imperative of serving God through serving our fellow men – and with God nothing was impossible, we were taught.  Therefore, I could volunteer to go with a bunch of strangers hundreds of miles away from home, with autonomy, and trust, and faith.

On the radio last month, I heard a man talking about how hard it was for an atheist to organize humanitarian work with other atheists.  He explained that he wasn’t dispassionate or uncaring about the needs of others in the world; but the simple fact was that their organization was necessarily lacking.  I see this as a daunting problem:  how do you teach confidence and opportunity without an organized group?  It is important to me that a vital offshoot of religious faith is in constructing a place to teach the nitty gritty of community organization in addition to teaching the moral imperative of building a strong community. Today one of the most effective tools I have is my faith community because it helps me teach my children those increasingly hard concepts of character and citizenship.

Last Saturday, I stood beside my 12 year old son, in front of a bright yellow funnel and big boxes of rice, soy, and dried vegetables.  We were assembling into plastic bags, meals for 150,000 people to be sent to another country.   He had, of his own volition, signed up to help and I was his enthusiastic ride to the elementary school where the assembly was taking place.  He is a part of a faith community with leaders interested in assisting him in finding opportunities to serve and ways to build his confidence; it was those leaders who had passed around the sign-up sheet during their meeting.  I asked him why he signed up, he said, “I thought it would be good to help people.”  Building confidence by providing opportunities to help others also means that we all look more often outside ourselves to the greater needs around us.  We want to help because we know it is good and makes our world a better world.

When I was a kid, my organized religious community saw to it that I was given the opportunity and confidence to be a self-sufficient and contributing member of my community.   Today, my moral imperative as a Christian demands that I serve others; but, my effectiveness in doing so comes from my training in my faith community.

He said kneeling to pray is the best way to get closer to the Lord and to 'a hard-hit ground ball.'

By CHRIS LAMB

Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey first met Jackie Robinson on Aug. 28, 1945. Rickey told Robinson that he wanted to sign the 26-year-old ballplayer and break the national pastime's color barrier. But for him to succeed, Rickey said, Robinson couldn't respond to the indignities that would be piled on him: "I'm looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back."

Rickey then opened a book published in the 1920s, Giovanni Papini's "Life of Christ," and read Jesus' words: "But whoever shall smite thee on the cheek, turn to him the other also." Robinson knew the Gospel and knew what was required of him. He replied, "I have two cheeks, Mr. Rickey. Is that it?" This meeting between the two Methodists, Rickey and Robinson, ultimately transformed baseball and America itself.

The exchange is depicted in "42," the biographical movie opening this weekend with Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey. But then the movie turns to the familiar, inspiring saga of Robinson's courageous fight against racism in baseball and society.

What is often overlooked in accounts of Robinson's life is that it is also a religious story. His faith in God, as he often attested, carried him through the torment and abuse of integrating the major leagues.

Robinson grew up in Pasadena, Calif., where his mother, Mallie, instilled in her five children the belief that God would take care of them. "I never stopped believing that," Robinson later said.

It took awhile for Robinson as a young man to understand what that faith in God meant. He was involved in more than one fight, and scrapes with the law, prompted by racial antagonism. Arnold Rampersad, in his 1997 Robinson biography, describes how the teenager was rescued from the streets by the Rev. Karl Downs, the minister of Scott United Methodist Church in Pasadena. Downs became a father figure to Robinson and brought him back into the church.

Downs became the channel through which religious faith "finally flowed into Jack's consciousness and was finally accepted there, if on revised terms, as he himself reached manhood," Mr. Rampersad writes. "Faith in God then began to register in him as both a mysterious force, beyond his comprehension, and a pragmatic way to negotiate the world." From that point on, Robinson made a habit of praying beside his bed before going to sleep.

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Robinson, who had been a stand-out athlete at UCLA, signed up in the spring of 1945 to play baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. Robinson openly scorned his whiskey-drinking and promiscuous teammates, once tossing a glass of scotch into a lighted fireplace to demonstrate how lethal liquor is. He also stunned his teammates by declaring that he was waiting until he was married to have sex.

As influential as Rev. Downs had been, though, no one had a more profound impact on Robinson's life than Branch Rickey, whose religious devotion was such that he didn't attend baseball games on Sundays. During their first meeting, after Rickey had read aloud the passage from Papini's "Life of Christ," he also asked Robinson to read from the section about "nonresistance." Robinson understood what was needed for him to succeed.

Nobody in sports had ever faced the sort of pressure, and abuse, that Jackie Robinson did when he took the field for the first time in a Brooklyn uniform on April 15, 1947. And yet Robinson didn't merely endure, he thrived.

In a 1950 newspaper interview, he emphasized his faith in God and his nightly ritual of kneeling at bedside to pray. "It's the best way to get closer to God," Robinson said, and then the second baseman added with a smile, "and a hard-hit ground ball."

After Robinson retired from baseball, he wrote newspaper columns for the New York Post and the Amsterdam News in New York. Many of the columns are collected in a new book, "Beyond Home Plate," edited by Michael G. Long. Writing for the Post in 1960, Robinson compared his own experience with "turning the other cheek" with the nonviolent confrontation of the civil-rights movement espoused by his friend, Martin Luther King Jr.

"I can testify to the fact that it was a lot harder to turn the other cheek and refuse to fight back than it would have been to exercise a normal reaction," Robinson wrote. "But it works, because sooner or later it brings a sense of shame to those who attack you. And that sense of shame is often the beginning of progress."

Mr. Lamb, a journalism professor at Indiana University in Indianapolis, is the author of "Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training" (University of Nebraska, 2004).

A version of this article appeared April 12, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Jackie Robinson: Faith in Himself—and in God.

By Krissah Thompson, Published: April 10

They are all in their 80s now — these former POWs during the Korean War.

One recalls in rapid-fire bursts how Father Emil Kapaun sneaked out of the barracks at night, risking his life to bring back morsels of food for his fellow prisoners.

Another remembers seeing the young American priest use a rock and a piece of metal to form a pan and then collect water to wash the hands and faces of the wounded.

A third chokes up when he tells of being injured and having an enemy soldier standing over him, rifle pointed; Kapaun walked up, pushed aside the muzzle and carried off the wounded man.

The military chaplain did not carry a gun or grenades. He did not storm hills or take beaches. He picked lice off of men too weak to do it themselves and stole grain from the Korean and Chinese guards who took the American soldiers as prisoners of war in late 1950.

Kapaun did not survive the prisoner camps, dying in Pyoktong in 1951. The man originally from tiny Pilsen, Kan., has been declared a “servant of God” — often a precursor to sainthood in the Catholic Church. And on Thursday, President Obama will posthumously award Kapaun a Medal of Honor. On hand will be Mike Dowe, 85; Robert Wood, 86; and Herbert Miller, 86.

“People had lost a great deal of their civility,” Wood says of life in the POW compound. “We were stacking the bodies outside where they were frozen like cordwood and here is this one man — in all of this chaos — who has kept . . . principles.”

Kapaun (pronounced Ka-PAWN) was so beloved that U.S. prisoners of war who knew him began calling for him to receive the military’s highest honor on the day they were released from their North Korean POW camp 60 years ago.

“The first prisoners out of that camp are carrying a wooden crucifix, and they tell the story at length,” says Roy Wenzel, a reporter at the Wichita Eagle who wrote an eight-part series and a book about Kapaun. “He was internationally famous and made the front page of newspapers.”

But Kapaun’s story soon faded from all but the memories of the men whom he served and the small church in rural Kansas that he had pastored.

“POWs come and tell stories of him,” said Father John Hotze, who serves in Wichita, an hour south of Kapaun’s home town. “They talked about how they would never have been able to survive had it not been for Father Kapaun, who gave them hope and the courage to live.”

In the heart of the battle

In the memories of his comrades, the chaplain is stuck in time, 34 years old and slight, with an angular chin that jutted out from the helmet he wore pushed down over his ears. At the sound of gunfire, GIs saw Kapaun heading in the direction of front-line troops in the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, on an old bicycle, his only form of transportation after his Jeep was lost.

He spoke with a Midwestern lilt and shared the lessons he learned on the 80-acre central Kansas farm where he was raised in a community of Czech immigrants. Family members recall a story Kapaun’s mother loved to tell involving her son, an old bonnet and a cow. It was usually her chore to milk the family’s only cow — but on this day it fell to young Emil. The cow kicked and fidgeted and wouldn’t let him get near. That is, until Emil went back into the farmhouse and put on one of his mother’s bonnets and a dress. He walked back to the barn, mimicking his mother’s walk. The cow obliged, and the chore got done.

Kapaun grew up to be a quiet man and was ordained a priest when he was 24.

Soon after the news broke in the summer of 1950 that North Korea had invaded the Republic of Korea, Kapaun was among the 300,000 U.S. servicemen called to war. He was initially sent to the fighting on the Pusan perimeter and marched north with the troops, celebrating Mass from the hood of his Jeep.

Two months after the war began, Kapaun was awarded a Bronze Star for running through enemy fire to drag wounded soldiers to safety. It was a brutal conflict with little information getting through to troops on the ground, some of whom did not know that the Chinese military had entered the war alongside North Korea.

“The Army was in terrible shape,” Wood said. “Our weapons didn’t work. Our men weren’t physically conditioned. We had malaria and dysentery. Father Kapaun was a constant example.”

On the front lines, the priest would “drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole,” Dowe recalled.

On Nov. 2, 1950, the 8th Cavalry was encircled by Chinese and North Korean troops at Unsan. The men had thought they would be home by Christmas. They did not have winter clothes, Wood said. Now they were prisoners.

On that day, Kapaun performed an act of heroism commemorated in a bronze sculpture that stands in front of the church in Pilsen. The other man in the statue, which depicts Kapaun helping a wounded soldier, is Herbert Miller.

Miller, a platoon leader, found himself standing under a small bridge in a dry creek encircled by enemy troops on a dark night.

“You could reach right out and touch them. The bullets was flying,” Miller recalled in an interview. “I moved 30 feet and I got hit with a hand grenade.”

The blast broke Miller’s ankle; he lay in the ditch until daylight, unable to escape. When he saw enemy troops coming up the nearby mountain, he tried to hide by pulling the body of a Korean soldier on top of him. But he was spotted and soon found himself being held at gunpoint.

“About that time, I saw this soldier coming across the road. He pushed that man’s rifle aside and he picked me up,” Miller said.

For a time, Kapaun carried Miller on his back.

That was the first time he met Kapaun. Both men began what would become known as the Tiger Death March, a trek of more than 80 miles to the North Korean POW camp.

‘The good thief’

Entering the camp in winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing, was brutal, Dowe, Miller and Wood recall. Each day, the men were fed a few grams of cracked grain that looked like birdseed. The soldiers were packed into such small quarters that they had to sleep on their sides so that everyone could lie down. There was more room by spring because so many did not survive the winter.

“We were at the point where if you decided you weren’t going to hack it anymore, the guys would say, ‘Don’t bother me in the morning.’ And you’d go to wake them up in the morning and they were dead,” Wood said. “You get your body reduced to a certain level and it doesn’t take much to snuff out the spark.”

Kapaun pressed on, trading his watch for a blanket, which he cut up to make socks for men whose feet were freezing. He told jokes and said prayers and gave his food away.

He earned the wartime nickname “the good thief” because of his ability to steal food for atrophic soldiers after he and others were captured.

“It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly starve. . . . So, standing before us all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who was crucified at the right hand of Jesus, asking for his aid,” Dowe wrote in the Saturday Evening Post 59 years ago. “I’ll never doubt the power of prayer again. Father, it seemed, could not fail.”

Kapaun took ill himself, recovering from bouts of sickness before getting weak again. The camp guards noticed and ordered the chaplain to an isolated room they called “the hospital.” The U.S. servicemen called it the dying room.

“They said in no uncertain terms he was going,” Wood said, recalling the protests from the POWs. “They wanted volunteers to carry him up there. I was one of those who carried him up there.”

Unable to walk, Kapaun reassured the soldiers that he was going to a better place. Wood remembers that the priest then turned to the guards and said, “Forgive them, oh Lord, for they know not what they do.”

Kapaun died days later, on May 23, 1951, at age 35, one of the more than 40,000 U.S. servicemen who died or were declared missing in what some came to call “the Forgotten War.”

Delayed recognition

Emil Kapaun’s nephew Ray Kapaun, 56, will accept the Medal of Honor on his uncle’s behalf. Ray has heard about the push to have his uncle awarded the medal since he was a child. It was in the past few years that the military’s leadership investigated the stories told by surviving POWs. Typically, medals must be awarded within two years of the acts of valor, but lawmakers from Kansas shepherded legislation that waived that requirement.

“It has taken a long time, but the flame of the Korean War just can’t be extinguished, and this is an outstanding example of that,” said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), one of the lawmakers involved in the decades-long effort. Obama, who has relatives from Kansas, signed the legislation this year.

Ray Kapaun has watched aged men’s eyes fill with tears as they spoke of his uncle’s role in their lives. Ray’s middle name is Emil, and he sometimes wonders whether he’s worthy of it.

“I look at my life and then you look and see what Father Emil did by just being who he was,” Kapaun said. “The reality of it is so hard to put your hands around, just hard to describe.”

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week because of it....

This excerpt from Andrew Preston's Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy is moving, and speaks for itself:

"But even before Lend-Lease was finalized, Roosevelt felt it necessary to tell Churchill and the British cabinet that the United States was committed to their survival. In January, he sent Harry Hopkins to London to confer with Churchill and impress upon the British a sense of Anglo-American solidarity. 'The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it,' Hopkins told Churchill shortly after arriving in an England under siege. 'He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him--there is nothing that he will not do so far as he has human power.' Weeks later, at a dinner in Glasgow, Hopkins imparted the same message with a great deal more emotion. Rather than try to emulate Churchill's soaring rhetoric, Hopkins simply quoted from a passage in the Book of Ruth (1:16): 'Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Even to the end.' Hopkins had meant to be reassuring, but the effect of his words was far greater than he had intended. According to Churchill's personal physician, who was at the dinner, the prime minister 'was in tears. He knew what it meant.' Hopkins' impromptu sermon 'seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man.' Though comments were censored for fear of antagonizing isolationists in the United States, presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood recalled that 'word of it spread all over Britain.' Lord Beaverbrook, in charge of Britain's wartime industrial production, told Sherwood that Hopkins's biblical pledge 'provided more tangible aid for Britain than had all the destroyers and guns and rifles and ammunition that had been sent previously.' (page 349)" 

Now listen to the YouTube video below.

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week because of it....

Being Easter, millions of Americans celebrated the rising of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, the "first fruits of them that slept." This is a sacred event for Christians the world-over, and a written description of the resurrection doesn't really work in a blog, or perhaps anywhere. Only feelings convey the meaning.

It seems to me that perhaps an American church-goer is a better citizen for this last week's celebrations because the trauma of death may not debilitate him or her when tragedy strikes in the form of a loved one's death. Thus, America, full of these believers, has been able to withstand calamitous events such as the Civil War and World War II.

Published: March 31, 2013

The obligations of religious toleration and pluralism require all who care not a bit about baseball to accept that opening day is more than the beginning of a sports season. It is a great religious festival.

It can’t be an accident that baseball always starts around the time of both Easter and Passover and, thus, “elicits a sense of renewal.” For the faithful, it means that “the long dark nights of winter are over” and “the slate is clean.” All teams, the exalted and lowly alike, “are tied at zero wins and zero losses.” This, in turn, means that the fervent cry “Wait’ll next year” becomes “prologue, replaced by hope.”

If you sneer at these spiritual metaphors, John Sexton, the president of New York University and a scholar of religion, offers a sermon you should hear. His new book, from which these quotations are drawn, is “Baseball as a Road to God.” The national pastime, he rightly insists, provides an excellent window onto the sacred, even as all that is good and holy helps you to understand baseball.

Sexton has taught a seminar on this subject for more than a decade, and his co-authors were two participants, Thomas Oliphant, the retired Boston Globe writer whose column I still miss, and Peter J. Schwartz, a former reporter for Forbes. Together, they have assembled some of baseball’s best-known tales (“the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff,” otherwise known as Bobby Thompson’s 1951 “Shot Heard ’Round the World” for the New York Giants) as well as lesser-known episodes that illustrate Sexton’s themes, including “blessings and curses.”

Which raises my only strong objection to Sexton’s account: As a convert to the Church of the New York Yankees from the more soulful tradition of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Sexton badly misreads those of us who have kept faith with the allegedly cursed Boston Red Sox. He accuses most of us, even after our historic triumphs of 2004 and 2007, of having “an incapacity to choose hope over despair.”

Never has a learned religious scholar made such a foolish error. I have long believed that hope is the virtue on which faith and love depend, an inclination formed while I was growing up rooting for the Sox during what Sexton shamefully dismisses as “a period of boring incompetence.” How dare he say this about the likes of Pete Runnels, Dick Radatz — and, yes, the young Carl Yastrzemski.

Beneath the yarns and the data, Sexton has a serious and controversial point to make. He rejects “scientism” and insists that there is another realm of knowing that is spiritual and religious.

Many would insist that “science captures or will capture all there is to know in any sense of the word,” he writes, and then he boldly declares: “I do not believe this.” There is, he says, “something that is plainly unknowable, ineffable, no matter how hard we try to figure it out.”

I’m with Sexton, and I think he is very shrewd in encouraging non-believers to try to understand the religious sensibility by focusing on baseball’s moments of “wonder, awe, hope, passion, heroism and community” and, especially, of “faith and doubt.”

In a lovely forward to the book, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — born, like Sexton, a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, she made the inspired choice of becoming a learned devotee of the Red Sox — tells of helping Gil Hodges break out of a batting slump by giving him “the St. Christopher’s medal blessed by the pope that I had won in a catechism contest by knowing the seven deadly sins.” She notes that since St. Christopher “was the patron saint of travel, I was certain that my medal had guided Hodges safely around the bases.” I’m sure it did, even though, sadly, Pope Paul VI removed Christopher’s feast day from the religious calendar.

My hunch is that professional baseball writers get impatient with intellectuals and columnists who tread on their territory. Compare, for example, Sexton’s otherworldly approach to the hard-nosed opening of “Francona,” the new book by former Red Sox manager Terry Francona and the Boston Globe’s celebrated sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy: “A baseball life is a life of interminable bus trips, tobacco spit, sunflower seeds, rain delays, day-night doubleheaders and storytelling. There’s a lot of standing in the outfield, shagging fly balls, and swapping lies.”

But Sexton has that covered. Baseball’s central calling to us, he concludes, is “to live slow and notice.” Opening day encourages us every year to seek a path to serenity and transcendence.



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