First Post

I’ve been doing a good amount of reading for my class with President Sexton, Baseball as a Road to God. One book is called The Sacred and the Profane and the other is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. The first is academic, the second fiction. Guess which one I like more.

While it isn’t my favorite of the two, The Sacred and the Profane is interesting in small doses. I don’t really know what the author’s point is because he didn’t often compare the sacred and the profane but usually expounded on the ways that the religious man experiences the Sacred in everyday life. He uses myriad religions to show is point that for the religious man everything in life is Sacred because everything is a symbol, everything represents something that is connected to the creation or to the God(s). He says that modern man experiences this on a much smaller scale than primitive man, which makes sense due to our reliance on technology and their reliance on nature, and being able to read natural signs instead of weather.com.

I think, though, that there are often opportunities for modern religious man to see the Sacred in his everyday life. A child’s smile, the perseverance of a weed growing in a sidewalk crack, the many moments of charity, the graffiti encouraging one to follow his dreams,  all these could been connected to the origin stories, to the cosmologies, to the Sacred.

As more of what both books say sinks in, and as we discuss them in class, I’m sure I’ll have more to say. I mostly wanted to just get something written, to get this blog started.