How I Lost a Religion

Very soon I will be going to a Red Sox game with my son and a friend and his son. We will sit in the shadow of the Green Monster, cheer and boo, eat Fenway franks and sing “Sweet Caroline” and otherwise perform the rituals of fandom. And afterward I will feel guilty because the Red Sox, the obsession of my first two decades of conscious life, no longer mean what they once meant to me and don’t mean much at all to my kids.

One of the great challenges of the 21st century is transmission — passing along beliefs and practices and traditions (not to mention human life itself) in the dissolving conditions created by scrolling and streaming and artificial intelligence. Our parental grade is incomplete,........

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