In the March 26 issue of the New Republic, Leon Kass and Eric Cohen analyzed the moral crisis of professional American sports. While focusing on the steroid scandals that have rocked Major League Baseball, Kass and Cohen argue that biotechnology is only a symptom of a deeper and broader adulteration of play.

The heart of the corruption, they argue, is a failure to grasp the proper ends of sport. It’s not all about winning and losing, “the separable, the measurable, and comparative results.” Sport is about the “humanity of the human performer.” At the heart of human play is “the lived experience, for doer and spectator alike, of a humanly cultivated gift, excellently at work, striving for superiority and with the outcome in doubt.” In professional sport, Kass and Cohen lament that these ends and goods of sport have been almost buried beneath mountains of hype, cheating, betting, drug abuse, scandals, and greed.

College athletics has an air of innocence lacking in pro sports, but even college sports has been infected with a spirit inimical to the ends of sport. All year, media attention has been focused on the fab freshmen: Kevin Love of UCLA, USC’s O. J. Mayo, and several others. Media attention to superstars conspires with the hype of March Madness to give NCAA basketball an ever more professional aura.

Not in Pullman, Washington, where the Washington State University Cougars have put together a remarkable two-season run, igniting frenzy in a chilly town hardly known for basketball.

My sons and I became Cougar fans when we moved to Idaho a decade ago. It hasn’t been easy. For the first several years, the Cougs were bottom-dwellers in the tough Pac-10. With the arrival of former Wisconsin coach Dick Bennet, who came out of retirement to take over the Cougs in 2003, things began to turn around, and in the last two seasons, under the command of Bennet’s son, Tony, the Cougs have attained heights fans could only dream of a few years ago. It’s a story straight from Hoosiers.

This year, they have been in the Top 25 all season, compiled an impressive 26-8 record, and obliterated Winthrop and Notre Dame in the first two rounds of the tournament. This week they have a chance to face off against North Carolina, who are favored to be this year’s tournament winners.

The Bennets have turned the program around without any All-American star to lean on. Many of the players were lightly recruited coming out of high school, and the Bennets drew players from Serbia, New Zealand, and Australia to round out the team. They recruited players for their character—their willingness to sacrifice, to subordinate their stardom for the team, their work ethic and their off-court conduct. They have emphasized fundamentals—tough defense, unselfish team play, ball control, hustle. They have one of the best defenses among Division I teams, and one of the lowest turnover average. These stats don’t get anyone Gatorade contracts, but they win games.

It’s entirely characteristic that junior guard Taylor Rochestie gave up his basketball scholarship so the coaches would have more to offer recruits for next year. And it’s entirely characteristic that, when asked how the Cougars held Notre Dame to half their season point average, senior forward Robbie Cowgill answered, “Coach told us to get back on defense.”

The Bennets’ coaching style illustrates Kass and Cohen’s point that the beauty of individual performance is multiplied by the choreography of team play: “Players survey the entire scene as they perform in concert with others, attending to where their teammates are heading and how their opponents are defending. They embody the rules, manage the clock, execute their game plans, and make innumerable strategic adjustments when things go badly.” Team sports thus cultivate not only “game-specific skills” but “determinate, discipline, courage, endurance, enterprise, perspicacity, and mental toughness.”

The Cougs have their work cut out for them. Few people give them much chance to beat North Carolina. But Washington State’s success illustrates that the kind of sport Kass and Cohen, and many others, long for still exists. WSU’s turnaround shows that there are still places where “the deepest appeal of sport is . . . the drama of the game,” where “in microcosm, the human drama is on display, with all its pathos and possibility.”

First Things readers in the DC area might be interested in an international symposium on natural law, hosted by Catholic University’s Center for Law, Philosophy and Culture. Beginning this Thursday evening and continuing through Sunday afternoon (March 27-30), the symposium will include plenary addresses from a number of FT board members and contributors, including Hardley Arkes, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert P. George, Kevin Hart, Stanley Hauerwas, Thomas S. Hibbs, and Gilbert Meilaender. Organized at the request of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, shortly before his election to the papacy, the conference “will focus on the human capacity for knowledge of universal moral principles across faiths and traditions.”

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it–believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt. . . . As long as we remain within [this shared understanding] . . . we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

The symposium is free and open to the public, but advance registration is recommended.

The world is now discussing Magdi Cristiano Allam’s baptism by Pope Benedict XVI during the Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s. Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new Crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more powerful: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. The faith of a single human being well may have changed the course of great events. Since 9/11 the leaders of the West have searched for a “moderate Islam” to counter radical Islamism, without however encountering a single prominent Muslim willing to unequivocally repudiated terrorism, wife-beating, the stoning of adulteresses and so forth.

Now Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of Italy’s newspaper of record and a bestselling author, tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Mr. Allam has a powerful voice. For years he was the exemplar of “moderate Islam” in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be “moderate.” His conversion shifts the agenda to the debate that Benedict opened at Regensburg in September 2006 over faith and reason, in opposition to arbitrary submission and violence. Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his stance as “I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.” Now we are seeing what faith can accomplish.

Mr. Allam abandoned Islam, he explains, because the religion is violent as a matter by its nature:

My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.

I had to ask myself about the attitude of those who publicly declared fatwas, Islamic juridical verdicts, against me—I who was a Muslim—as an “enemy of Islam,” “hypocrite because he is a Coptic Christian who pretends to be a Muslim to do damage to Islam,” “liar and vilifier of Islam,” legitimating my death sentence in this way. I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive. (emphasis added)

But it was not recognition that “the root of evil is inherent in Islam” that led Mr. Allam to the Church, but Pope Benedict XVI’s defense of faith and reason, as he recounts:

But undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert was that with Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admired and defended as a Muslim for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.

Benedict’s message is “revolutionary,” Mr. Allam added. Many converts to Christianity from Islam now may step out of the shadows, and the Church may abandon its undue prudence about proselytizing in Muslim lands:

His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.

For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us. By one of those “fortuitous events” that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on Sept. 3, 2003 was entitled “The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts.” It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself. Well, I hope that the Pope’s historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves.

What the outcome will be of the evangelization of Muslims lies beyond all speculation: that is a matter of every soul’s relationship to God. But the global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict’s Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.