SOURCE: Lord, Timothy C. “Hegel, Marx, and Shoeless Joe: Religious Ideology in Kinsella's Baseball Fantasy.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 10, no. 1 (fall 1992): 43-51.

In the following essay, Lord explores the spiritual elements in Shoeless Joe, noting that the plot of the novel reveals “basic philosophical assumptions about spiritual and material reality.”

In 1843, at approximately the time of the rise of modern baseball in America, Karl Marx wrote the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. In the “Introduction” he asserts that “Religion … is the opium of the people” (54). It has been indicated that sport has since replaced religion in this capacity,¹ and in W. P. Kinsella's celebrated first novel, the baseball fantasy Shoeless Joe, baseball becomes both a metaphor and a replacement for religion and the religious life. Although the novel's protagonist, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, rejects and even has contempt for contemporary organized religion...