NY Times Best Selling Author Speaks on Baseball As A Road To God

The Church of the Immaculate Conception, which serves the Mahwah area and Ramapo College, located at 900 Darlington Avenue, is pleased to announce the next speaker in its Spiritual Life Program Series. Dr. John Sexton, New York Times Best Selling author and former President of New York University will present a talk based on the title of his book, “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game,” on Thursday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the church.

For more than a decade, Dr. Sexton used baseball to illustrate the elements of spiritual life in a wildly popular undergraduate course at NYU. Now he’s sharing this collegiate course with the community. Dr. Sexton will discuss the surprisingly large number of concepts shared between baseball and religion: sacred places and time, faith and doubt, blessings and curses, and more. Using some of the great works of baseball fiction as well as the actual game's fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals, he will illustrate that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime; it can be a road to enlightenment.

Following the talk, Dr. Sexton will be signing his book and there will be light refreshments. This talk is free and open to people of all faiths. For more information, contact The Church of the Immaculate Conception’s Parish Office at 201- 327-1276 or visit www.iccmahwah.org.

About Dr. John Sexton

President Emeritus John Sexton served as fifteenth President of New York University from 2002 through 2015. He is NYU’s Benjamin Butler Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus of the Law School. Currently, he is serving a six-month appointment as the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress.

During his presidency, NYU’s reach and stature grew tremendously. He oversaw the University’s largest increase in the number of Arts and Science faculty; applications for undergraduate admissions reached record levels; and NYU’s world rankings have increased dramatically. Other milestones include a merger with Polytechnic University, now the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and, in 2008, the most successful completed fundraising campaign in the history of American higher education.

A signature of his tenure was the emergence of NYU as a Global Network University, with a network of 11 international academic centers on six continents and degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, President Emeritus Sexton also serves on the board of the Institute of International Education and is past Chair of the American Council on Education. In 2015, he received the TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence, recognizing outstanding university presidents, and the Institute of International Education’s Duggan Award for Mutual Understanding. He is also the recipient of fourteen honorary degrees.

Before coming to NYU, President Emeritus Sexton clerked at the United States Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals. From 1966-1975, he was a Professor of Religion at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn.

President Sexton received a Bachelor’s degree in history, a Master’s degree in comparative religion, and a PhD in the history of American religion, all from Fordham University. He received a law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.