Read “And God Created Football,” an essay in the January/February 2010 edition of Books & Culture that reviews two books on football and asks “is football a religion or even religion-like?”

The February 1, 2010, piece “Stay in the Struggle” by Benjamin J. Chase and published by ChristianityToday.com argues that the competitive world of athletics is not so different from those of business, home and other environments. Chase is a former lacrosse player at Wheaton College. 

Read the February 1, 2010, essay “Amen, and a Foul” by Mark Householder, president of Athletes in Action, an international sports ministry.

The cover story of the February 2010 issue of Christianity Today is by author Shirl J. Hoffman and is titled “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture — and what might be done about it.” The article takes a critical look at the growing overlap between American Christianity and American sports.

The 30-second Super Bowl ad that features Tim Tebow and his mother explaining how she rejected medical advice that she consider an abortion due to complications while pregnant with him was sponsored by Focus on the Family, a leading conservative Christian lobby. The  controversy over the television spot was heightened because the network, CBS, said […]

Defense lawyer Gregory J. Kuykendall specializes in capital cases and wrote about the politics of death sentencing in Arizona. He is also lead death penalty counsel to the Mexican Foreign Ministry.

John D. Carlson is associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University. His books include, as co-editor, Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. His work focuses on religion, ethics and politics.

Ted A. Smith is associate professor of preaching and ethics at Emory University in Atlanta. Smith focuses on questions of ethics and justice, such as the death penalty, in a democratic society where the majority may support ethically problematic measures.

Sister Helen Prejean is a Roman Catholic nun and author of Dead Man Walking, an account of her ministry with death row inmates in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison that was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1996. Her most recent book is The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions. Prejean, whose office is in New Orleans, […]