"Baseball is not a religion," said Lisle Dalton, a professor of religious studies at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., about 30 miles from Cooperstown. "But if you look at the way people put their emotion and energy, their intellectual ability, into sports, they start to look a lot like people who used to put all that into religion in an earlier era."

C: I've been waiting a really, REALLY long time for someone to write something like this. Basically, Dalton argues that baseball is infused with the same energy of a religion, but it is not--likely, though unexplained by the author, due to the fact that baseball lacks large components key to most definitions of religion: sacred texts, almost otherworldly transcendence, etc. Many of the authors we've read thus far have been seeming to be mistaking simile for metaphors: baseball is like a religion vs. baseball is a religion. Dalton can admit that baseball has religious qualities--totemic connections to the sacred, as Durkheim would argue--but she keeps a certain distance.

A part of me wonders if faith must be integrated into a definition of religion, or belief--something that cannot be proven, but only seemingly felt or experienced by the practitioner.