Living the dream through life's challenges: lessons from Bishop Tutu, a successful African American businessman and other diverse followers of Dr. King.

God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time by Desmond Tutu Doubleday, March 2004 $16.95, ISBN 0-385-47784-8

Much of what Desmond Tutu says in this slim book, which he calls "the cumulative expression of my life's work, will be familiar ground for Christians:

"God loves us." All are equal in God's eyes. Suffering is redemptive. "Good will prevail." Forgiveness is good for both the wronged and the wrongdoer. In fact, his message is so biblically solid and so poetically expressed, at times, you may forget that you are not reading directly from one of the Apostles.

What sets it apart is that Tutu is saying it--not just as the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Nobel laureate who helped end apartheid. Tutu is also a man who has seen extreme evil face to face and can still argue for forgiveness of the cruelest of evildoers. He has also been a witness, minister and strategist throughout the rectification of the seemingly impossible division within a nation. "Who in their right mind could ever have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but the most ghastly awfulness, of how not to govern a nation?" he writes.

After he retired from his church position in 1996, President Nelson Mandela named Tutu Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its mandate was to hear the confessions of some of the most notorious perpetrators of atrocities during apartheid; these confessors could apply for amnesty in exchange for full disclosure. In this book, as in his earlier No Future Without Forgiveness (Image Books, 2000), Tutu describes how painful and difficult it was often just to listen, concluding: "I couldn't pray. I could only weep." Yet, as South Africa observes the 10th anniversary of its new era, be tells a story of faith, victory and hope for the future of the world.

What is God's dream? "It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know they are members of one family, the human family, God's; family, My family."

He and others who have read this book hear echoes of the dream described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So what is Tutu's point? Like King, he is calling us into action, and not just us as Christians but as humans of all faiths or of no faith, he says. God cannot do it alone. Tutu argues that the sum total of our interactions and our decisions to act in moral ways pave the way to a better future. Lest we forget, he includes a postscript with Web sites listing opportunities to give, volunteer and agitate for peace, justice and charity.

"We must work to bring a time when history is ready for all people to be free, to be fed, and to live in peace," he writes, "because as God's partners, we can help to determine the time frame in which God's plan unfolds and God's dream is realized."

(An authorized biography of Tutu, Rabble Rouser For Peace by John Allen, is scheduled for publication by the Free Press, in fall 2006.)

Angela P. Dodson, executive editor of Black Issues Book Review, is also host of a radio program about Roman Catholics of African descent.