It feels very strange to have major league baseball\u2019s Opening Day land on Maundy Thursday. But while a March 29th start marks a stark break with century-plus-old tradition \u2014 in one of the few American pastimes that really emphasizes continuity with the past \u2014 that timing may serve as a reminder that Christianity and baseball have often intertwined in American history. For example, last summer I used an\u00a0Anxious Bench\u00a0<\/em>post to explore\u00a0the religious history of the Negro Leagues<\/a>.<\/p>\n So for your Holy Week\/Opening Day reading pleasure, let me recommend a few other posts, articles, and essays on Christianity and baseball:<\/p>\n \u2022 Last year our friend Paul Putz<\/a> not only reviewed recent spiritual biographies of Jackie Robinson<\/a> for\u00a0Christianity Today<\/em>, but blogged about Felipe Alou<\/a>, a convert from Catholicism to evangelicalism who was one of the first Latinos featured by Fellowship of Christian Athletes.<\/p>\n \u2022 Earlier Paul and sports historian Art Remillard had included Billy Sunday, Bob Feller, and Christy Mathewson among their \u201cproto-Sportians<\/a>\u201d in American religious history. (Paul has also reviewed a book about Mathewson\u2019s faith<\/a> for the Sport in American History\u00a0<\/em>blog.\u00a0I once wrote about baseball\u2019s \u201cChristian Gentleman\u201d as\u00a0part of a post on muscular Christianity<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u2022 One of the many reasons to continue lamenting\u00a0the end<\/a> of\u00a0Books & Culture\u00a0<\/em>is that that Christian review so regularly featured essays about baseball. Fortunately, many of those articles are still available online. For a time Michael R. Stevens compiled an annual season preview<\/a>, and contributed occasional pieces like this one<\/a>\u00a0on Roger Kahn\u2019s book about the end of the color line. I also appreciate historian Eric Miller\u2019s essay<\/a> on baseball as (more than?) business:<\/p>\n Yet our abiding, sentimental faith that market-driven enterprise can safeguard and nurture our most necessary ideals, practices, and institutions persists. Haven\u2019t we endured enough history by now to know better? If neither education nor government nor church nor the family nor health nor the sky nor even finance itself is safe in the market\u2019s hands\u2014despite the vigilance of good men and women striving to make the system work for us, not merely for itself\u2014why should we give baseball over to it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n