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My service in the Michigan House of Representatives has been a wonderful, eighteen-year journey. Along the way, I have come to know people with very different gifts, experiences, and values. I have wrestled with the conflicting demands of constituents and issues of conscience, and I have struggled with opposing ideas about what constitutes opportunity and social justice. In what follows I document my journey of faith in three sections: the discovery of God in the lives of fellow sojourners; a Christian approach to the political process; and a vision for racial and economic justice.

The struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa, as many have argued, is theological as well as political. This is so, in the words of Ben Marais, because 'Apartheid erodes the very basis of humanity'. It is also because the great majority of South Africans have some Christian identity and church affiliation, yet their faith commitments are heavily conditioned by class interests and particular ideologies. Consequently, prophetic Christianity, in relating biblical values to the analysis of society and the search for justice, has divided Christian communities by confronting the established churches as well as the state.

Although it can be argued that, in order to expose Christianity's role as a tool to pacify the masses in capitalist exploitation, a revolutionary can appropriate and use Christianity to undermine itself, there is ambiguity as to how far this re-appropriation can go without running the danger of re-affirmation. After converting to Marxism, the literary Ngugi was consciously aware that his abstract economic analysis needed a credible vehicle of delivery to his peasant and worker audience's communicative repertoire, but his conversion also meant that he should abandon the rather romantic indulgence in Gikuyu mysteries of imagination, and turn instead to Christian mythology and imagery that provided him the rich and effective vessel so evident in Devil on the Cross and Matigari. But how does Ngugi reconcile the strategic value of religion with basic Marxism that categorizes it as opium to desensitize people from the realization of their material situation, and thus rob them of the potential action for their salvation? And, once the revolutionary has used religion successfully to attain liberation, how does he dispose of it? In this study, I argue that Ngugi does not seem to have resolved this dilemma in his literary writing, and examine his use of Christianity and the tensions and contradictions that this creates in interpreting the body of his works as a unit.

Title Page; Acknowledgments; Introduction; The Borderlands as a Religious Resource; Immigration and Some of Its Implications for Christian Identity and Doctrine; Alternately Documented Theologies; How to Shape Christian Perspectives on Immigration?; The Borderlands as a Political and Religious Reality; Borderlife and the Religious Imagination; A Tour of the Border in San Diego; Spiritualities of Social Engagement; The Borderlands as a Call to Action; The Subversive Act of Breaking Bread; A Divided Friendship: Friendship Park; Vicissitudes of the Margins; Index; Index of Bible Passages

Good Game retells numerous fascinating stories from the world of ancient and contemporary sports and draws on the history of the Christian tradition to answer "What would it really mean to think Christianly about sport?" --from publisher description