The church of baseball

 My colleague repeated again an old profession of faith I've heard him attest before, and as before he met the predictable chuckles in the conference room with an emphatic: "I'm serious!" And he was. He insisted that baseball is his religion. Just like it was Morris Cohen's:

When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on “A Moral Equivalent for War,” I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations, and William James’s were due to the fact that he lived in Cambridge, a city which, in spite of the fact that it has a population of 100,000 souls (including the professors), is not represented in any baseball league that can be detected without a microscope. The Dial,Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919)

And then there's Professor Ted Cohen...

Interestingly, one of the topics discussed at our staff meeting yesterday was whether to teach a course on Religion and Sport. Well of course we should, right alongside Philosophy and Baseball.