Mohamad Bazzi is a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is working on a project about Hezbollah and the Shiite community in Lebanon. He is the former Middle East bureau head for (New York) Newsday and is based in New York City.

Naomi Sakr is a reader in communication at the University of Westminster in London, England. She is the author of Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community, Legitimacy and Public Life, which looks at the impact of Arab media on politics.

Orayb Najjar is a professor of journalism at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill. She argues that the three Middle East news stations – Al Jazeera, Al Arabiyya, Al Manar – organize coverage around the question, “How should the Middle East be organized?” and that, as a result, they disseminate political news differently than other news […]

Dale Eickelman is a professor of anthropology and human relations at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. He and Jon Anderson are the editors of New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, which, in part, looks at how new media such as the internet influence politics in Muslim countries.

Gideon Rose is managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and an expert on terrorism, among other issues, in the Middle East and South Asia. He is based in New York City.

Read a Sept. 18, 2009, Zenit.org story posted by Beliefnet.com about the religious roots of the modern Olympic creed.

Read an Aug. 12, 2004, Beliefnet.com article on the religious origins of the Greek Olympics. It’s by Agapi Stassinopoulos, author of Gods and Goddesses in Love: Make the Myth a Reality for You.

Read a Beliefnet column from 2000 on how multiple religions see sports.

Read an excerpt from Andrew Cooper’s book Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports. It’s posted by Beliefnet.com.