Pastor Herb Lusk is a former Philadelphia Eagles tailback who is thought to be the first NFL player to kneel and pray in the end zone after scoring a touchdown, in 1977. Since 1982 Lusk has headed the congregation at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia.

Husain Haqqani is a senior fellow at the Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World and director for the Center for International Relations at Boston University. He is the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.

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.

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..

Read a Jan. 13, 2013, story published by Slate about a survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute that found 27 percent of Americans think that a higher power plays some role in deciding who will win sporting events.