Baseball is a game invented by nineteenth-century Protestants and the drama relates to Transcendentalism because Transcendentalists struggled to free themselves from traditional Protestant Christianity. Baseball players struggle to free themselves from the predicaments they face in a game that parallel the basic drama of Christian experience.They face on the base paths a representation of life prescribed for them in a form that they struggle to escape. Transcendentalists also tried to escape from an unwanted form of life. In the case of baseball players, the life they oppose is expressed in a cycle of events parallel to Christianity that they pass through against their will and transcend by scoring a run. For transcendentalists, it is Christianity itself that they transcend.
Daniel McNeill
Read the complete essay, Transcendentalism and Baseball, at the website of The United States of the World at: www.usoftheworld.com/culture
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