Meet Tim Tebow And Tony Dungy's Christian Sensei

Tomorrow's New York Times has a short story on Nathan Whitaker, who is presumably among the most successful people in the football-media nexus, and presumably unbeknownst to you.

He's the ghostwriter of several wildly bestselling books—among them Through My Eyes, written with Tim Tebow, and Quiet Strength, written with Dungy—with over two million copies in print. That's an impressive literary career for someone who was toiling as the Tampa Bay Bucs' staff lawyer ten years ago.

More from the Times:

"I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your witness in the middle of this circus," Mr. Whitaker recalled saying to Dungy [who was rumored to be on the chopping block] that day in 2001, using the Christian term for an example of faith. Mr. Dungy replied, "Sometimes I think God wants there to be a circus so we can show there's another way to respond."

In that brief exchange, at a time of adversity rather than triumph, Mr. Whitaker unknowingly embarked upon a writing career that has become a phenomenon in Christian publishing and more broadly in the theology known as "muscular Christianity."

The Times article does a better job than we can do here of explaining exactly what it means by "muscular Christianity," a theological term, although this photo comes pretty close.

Faith at the Center of the Circus of Sports [NYT]