UW News

March 8, 2007

Baseball’s religious meaning to be explored in March 28 talk

The Comparative Religion Program presents Christopher Evans speaking on Baseball: an American Religion? at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 28 in 220 Kane.


As the national pastime, baseball has been viewed as uniquely American – a phenomenon that serves as a repository of deep-seated cultural and religious meaning. This lecture will explore how views of baseball throughout American history have generated a distinctive religious language that transcends specific historical eras, and how “baseball as religion” continues to manifest itself today in American popular culture.


Evans is the Sallie Knowles Crozer Professor of Church History at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, NY, where he teaches a variety of courses in religious history, religion and popular culture, and theology. He is the author/editor of five books including The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture and The Kingdom is Always but Coming: a Life of Walter Rauschenbusch, which received an Award of Merit from Christianity Today magazine in 2005.


Tickets are $8 for UW Alumni Association members, $10 for non-members and $5 for students. Ticket proceeds will assist the program in supporting public lectures on Religion and Public Life, in course development, and in faculty support.


The lecture is co-sponsored by the Founders Fund in Comparative Religion, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the UW Alumni Association