playing

This book by James Evans is a really interesting series of Christian reflections on culture, society, God, "the margins" and how playfulness encapsulates & shapes the creative and prophetic dimensions latent in all things; I found this book far more academic than I was expecting but it was a refreshing deep dive having been working on something similar for much of last year. Evans covers a lot of ground in a concise book - the Spirit's guiding acts in subverting things of worldly wisdom and convention, Jesus's examples of how "playing" with rules/norms can refocus sociocultural imaginations out of self-maintained prisons & on toward things of Heaven: underlying his conceptual frameworks and plentiful in examples is the lived experiences of African-American Christianity, and I think for that alone this book should be high up the reading lists of all white christian leaders; the graceful depth and theological poignancy here make this a must-read for this oh-so-typically-unplayful demographic in my opinion.