Read “Is God watching World Cup soccer?,” a June 13, 2010, entry at USA Today‘s religion blog, Faith & Reason, which rounds up a number of stories related to religion and the tournament.

Read “The Evangelicalism of Brazil,” a June 14, 2010, post at the World Cup blog of The New Republic, about the number of dedicated evangelical Protestants on Brazil’s team and what it says about religion in what was once a Catholic stronghold in Latin America.

“Who’s Afraid of Sacred Soccer?” is a June 16, 2010, essay at ReligionDispatches.org by Gary Laderman, head of the Department of Religion at Emory University.

Read the Wikipedia entry on the 2010 World Cup. The entry provides a useful overview of the tournament and historical background. As with any open-source site, reporters should double-check all information in the entry.

See an interactive guide to all the games and teams, broken down by schedule, venue, and groups and stages.

Christopher Kaczor is a philosophy professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and author of The Seven Big Myths About the Catholic Church: Distinguishing Fact From Fiction About Catholicism, in which he discusses the papacy. He can discuss Benedict’s legacy.

Phillip Thompson is executive director of Emory University’s Aquinas Center of Theology. The Aquinas Center is one of four independent Catholic intellectual centers at a non-Catholic U.S. university.

Kenneth Pennington holds the Kelly-Quinn Chair of Ecclesiastical and Legal History at the Catholic University of America and is an expert in church history and canon law. He has written extensively about the papacy.

The Rev. Mark Morozowich is dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He can discuss Benedict’s legacy, particularly his contribution to the Eastern churches, and general topics related to the Vatican. Morozowich is an authority on early Christian liturgy and eastern Churches (Orthodox and Catholic).