Sports have increasingly become a pulpit for expressing an athlete’s religious beliefs. Whether it’s the baseball player who points his index finger skyward after hitting a home run or the running back who kneels in the end zone after scoring a touchdown, God appears to have joined many professional, collegiate and high school teams. But what do we make of this religiosity in what is otherwise a secular game?

Praying Fields explores the interaction between sports and religion by inviting coaches and athletes to talk openly about their faith -- or lack of faith -- and how their beliefs have affected them on and off the field. In conversations with sports people from all levels -- professional, college, high school and youth -- we’ll try to answer whether religion plays a greater role in riskier sports, whether God is a fan of [your team name here] and whether the winner-take-all mentality agrees with religious teachings.

I have been a sportswriter for nearly 15 years, most recently at The Washington Post, where I covered the Baltimore Ravens' Super Bowl-winning season and the Maryland women's basketball team's run to an NCAA championship. Raised a Methodist, I consider myself a “submarine” Christian, surfacing at Christmas and Easter. I hope these discussions lead to a better understanding of how people come to believe what they do.

How do you comfort an organization when someone dies? Sean Taylor’s unexpected death reverberated through the Washington Redskins this week, leaving players, coaches and team personnel grieving. And as they mourned, many of them turned to their faith to help them cope with their loss.

The three men at the forefront of the grief counseling, team chaplains Lee Corder, Brett Fuller and Jerry Leachman, did their best to ease sorrow and make sense of the tragedy. Yet this cadre – most teams have one not three chaplains – was not enough to alleviate the organization’s collective ache.

“I have felt completely inadequate because there are things that man just can’t do,” Fuller said

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