Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance Book Club

A Six-Week Community Book Study on Zoom

This fall, the Black Sports Ministry Network invites you to join us for a free six-week community book study exploring Dr. Gary Green II’s Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance Beyond the Moral Limits of Race in Sport (Fortress Press, 2025).

Tuesdays | October 6–November 17, 2026
8:00–9:00 PM Eastern Time
No session on Tuesday, November 3

What Does It Mean to Recognize Black Athleticism as Brilliance?

What does it mean to recognize Black athleticism not simply as physical excellence, but as intellectual, creative, spiritual, and embodied brilliance?

In Playing the Game, Gary Green II offers an interdisciplinary examination of race, religion, embodiment, and Black athleticism. Through the experiences of athletes including Marshawn Lynch, Steph Curry, Deion Sanders, and Serena Williams, Green challenges racial narratives that have historically reduced Black athletes to their physical bodies while obscuring their intellectual, spiritual, creative, and emotional complexity.

Throughout the six-week series, participants will engage Green’s concept of Embodied Brilliance while exploring questions of race, theology, capitalism, neoliberalism, respectability politics, media representation, spirituality, play, and the commodification of Black athletes.

This will be more than a traditional book discussion. Each gathering will create space for contemplative reflection, learning, dialogue, and community. Sessions will include an opening meditation or reflection, a brief lecture or guest speaker, small-group conversation, and collective reflection.

Our Six-Week Journey

Across the first five sessions, we will move chapter by chapter through Green’s framework:

Week 1 — The Myth of Level Playing Fields
We’ll introduce the concept of Embodied Brilliance and examine the contradiction between celebrating Black athletic achievement while continuing to reproduce racial stereotypes about Black bodies.

Week 2 — Marshawn Lynch: “Beast” and the Historical Play on “Human”
We’ll explore the categories of “beast,” “human,” and race, as well as Lynch’s refusal to participate in expected media performances as a possible assertion of agency and humanity.

Week 3 — Steph Curry: Range Beyond the Play of Neoliberal Rationality
This conversation will consider athletic intelligence, creativity, technology, labor, and Black genius—and what happens when Black athleticism is understood as brilliance rather than simply “natural ability.”

Week 4 — Deion Sanders: Presence Beyond the Pull of Respectability
We’ll explore Prime Time, authenticity, performance, respectability politics, Black joy, presence, and what it means to take up space without apology.

Week 5 — Embodied Brilliance Beyond the Myth
We’ll consider sport as both physiological and spiritual practice, exploring play, inspiration, creativity, transcendence, and the experiences of Black women athletes, including Green’s engagement with Serena Williams and womanist wisdom.

Week 6 — A Special Conversation with Gary Green II
We’ll close the series with the author himself. After five weeks of sustained engagement with Playing the Game, participants will have an opportunity to reflect on the book as a whole, hear directly from Green, and explore where the concept of Embodied Brilliance might take us next.

Who Should Participate?

This book club is free and open to anyone to all social and spiritual identities. Anyone interested in the intersections of sport, race, religion, theology, culture, and Black life. You do not need specialized training in theology, sports studies, or racial theory to participate.

Whether you are a chaplain, coach, athlete, educator, theologian, sports administrator, student, ministry leader, scholar, or simply someone who wants to think more deeply about the meaning of sport and Black humanity, there is a place for you in this conversation.

Come ready to read, reflect, question, listen, and learn together.

Grab your copy of Playing the Game and join the Black Sports Ministry Network this fall for a conversation about Embodied Brilliance—and what it might mean for the future of sport, ministry, and community.