Playing the Game Panel
I had the honor of being a part of a book launch that will change how we think about life, and sport, and spirituality.
On November 19, 2025, Rev. Dr. Gary F. Green officially launched his significant new book, Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance beyond the Moral Limits of Race in Sport. The launch featured a panel of distinguished guests, including C.J. Ham (NFL fullback for the Minnesota Vikings), Dr. Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch (Professor at Union Presbyterian Seminary), and your truly.
I was honored to be part of this conversation as a student at United. My academic work is deeply inspired by this way of thinking about social reality—one that names, disrupts, and reimagines the moral frameworks through which race, embodiment, and power are understood.
Dr. Green’s book attends carefully to the ways language fails to capture what Black bodies manifest—particularly in the context of sport. It names the excess that spills beyond description, the brilliance that resists containment. Near the end of the book, there is a turn—a generative twist—that illuminates the kind of consciousness the next world will require.
There are far too many words to say about this book, but for now I will say this: if you are someone who grew up in Christianity, who moves through the world with a kind of queer consciousness—one that has made you aware of yourself as an outsider in multiple rooms—and who has learned to transform that outsiderness into creativity, then this book is for you.
It teaches you that you are not alone.
While the book is not explicitly about queerness, at least not on the surface, it speaks profoundly to something deep within me: to how I am oriented toward the world, to the boxes Black athletes are placed into, and to how those same logics of containment land on my body.
This book is powerful. It breaks ground that has long awaited rupture. That is why my copy looks the way it does—the same way my Bible once did. Playing the Game has become a sacred text for me, foundational to my work in the world.
