Tom Krattenmaker is director of communications for the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Conn. A former reporter, he writes frequently on religion and public life for USA Today and Salon. His books include Onward Christian Athletes.

Azyumardi Azra is a history professor and rector of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is the author of numerous books, including Indonesia, Islam and Democracy: Dynamics in a Global Context.

Hassan Abbas is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in Cambridge, Mass. He is an expert on religious extremism in South and Central Asia and is the author of a book on extremism in Pakistan.

Read a Jan. 29, 2013, article from The Atlantic that compares sports fans to members of a religious congregation.

Read a July 31, 2012, article from The Wall Street Journal about the struggles Muslim women face while competing in the Olympics.

Tamara Cofman Wittes is a senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She is director of the institution’s Middle East Democracy and Development Project.

Shibley Telhami is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and an expert on politics in the Persian Gulf and in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. He is also the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Read a Feb. 6, 2013, story published by BigThink.com that compares religion and the spectacle of sports.

Jean-Francois Seznec is a visiting associate professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is an expert on democratization in the Persian Gulf region..