SOURCE: Beach, Charles Franklyn. “Joyful vs. Joyless Religion in W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 16, no. 1 (fall 1998): 85-94.

In the following essay, Beach examines Kinsella's assertion that “the best sports literature isn't really about sports,” using Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe as his primary example.

On the surface, W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe appears to be a story about baseball, about dreams that come true. However, as Kinsella states, “The best sports literature isn't really about sports” (qtd. in Horvath and Palmer 186). This holds true for Shoeless Joe, a novel that raises a question about priorities: What are the most important things in life? Kinsella uses the language and imagery of myth and religion to answer this question, in the process considering what role religious faith plays in life.

Midway through the novel, Moonlight Graham describes his views on religion in relating his...