{"id":5952,"date":"2017-04-13T12:56:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T16:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groups.etown.edu\/news\/?p=5952"},"modified":"2017-04-21T14:47:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T18:47:58","slug":"religious-studies-professor-co-authors-book-on-jackie-robinson-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/2017\/04\/13\/religious-studies-professor-co-authors-book-on-jackie-robinson-spirituality\/","title":{"rendered":"Religious studies professor co-authors book on Jackie Robinson spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>It might seem peculiar that a publication\u00a0on Jackie Robinson\u2019s life doesn\u2019t focus on baseball, but authors Michael Long and Chris Lamb purposefully tapped into a much different aspect of Robinson\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Lamb and Long are the authors of \u201cJackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography.\u201d Long, an associate professor of religious studies at Elizabethtown College, explained the focus on religion was a purposeful one. \u201cMost of the writings have ignored what fueled his courage and sacrifice, and that is his Christian faith,\u201d Long said. The book was an effort to \u201cadd a missing dimension in studies about Robinson,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Long and Lamb had previously written about Robinson\u2019s faith for Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal, respectively. It was Lamb who came up with the idea of writing an entire book on the subject.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people are attracted to Robinson because of his baseball years, but I find them much less interesting than I do his politics and religion and civil rights work,\u201d the professor said, referring to Robinson as \u201cone of the major players in the modern civil rights movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

I like to think that I pass on some of my passion for this particular subject to my students.\u201d<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt was really Robinson who paved the way for (Martin Luther) King and others to make great strides in the 1950s and 1960s,\u201d Long said.<\/p>\n

The E-town professor emphasized Robinson\u2019s relationship with his mother and how she taught her son the importance of being proud of his skin color. \u201cHe came to see it as a sign of God\u2019s favor,\u201d Long said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose more than anything else, my hope is that readers will come away with a sense of gratitude for a man whose faith changed not only the color of baseball, but led to the transformation of U.S. society, including the lives that we enjoy today,\u201d Long said.<\/p>\n

The professor also hopes to incorporate the lessons from his book\u00a0into the classroom. He teaches courses in religion and non-violence in America, which overlap with the biography.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gives the students the chance to see abstract teachings come alive in a human life that\u2019s so important to me,\u201d Long said. \u201cI like to think that I pass on some of my passion for this particular subject to my students.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It might seem peculiar that a publication\u00a0on Jackie Robinson\u2019s life doesn\u2019t focus on baseball, but authors Michael Long and Chris Lamb purposefully tapped into a much different aspect of Robinson\u2019s life. Lamb and Long are the authors of \u201cJackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography.\u201d Long, an associate professor of religious studies at Elizabethtown College, explained the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":5953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[178,8,764],"tags":[490,1128,209],"class_list":["post-5952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-achievements","category-features","category-research-and-academics","tag-achievements-2","tag-feature","tag-religious-studies","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5952"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5973,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952\/revisions\/5973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}