#for warriors and 49ers who started out as a chaplain at san quentin which is. a fascinating career track

[moregraceful]

anyway before i got extremo derailed tonight, i was reading neon's curated collection of quotes from a russian interview with klim kostin and it got me wondering if any nhl teams keep chaplains on staff. considering this is the league where they will not even provide translators or language teachers like 95% of the time, i wasn't expecting them to, but cursory research turned up hockey ministries international which appears to pair local christian church pastors with junior, minor, and major leagues and call it chaplaincy even though everything on their website feels like youth pastor jock version. also found this very interesting if christian-focused athletic article from 2019 about the roles of faith in the nhl which mentions 23 nhl teams having a chaplain on staff. but the entire framing around the hmi program and chaplains in the nhl seemed to be around christianity? which admittedly i have only experienced chaplaincy in relation to hospice or extreme crisis situations so maybe single-faith focused chaplaincy is more standard when people aren't like imminently dying.

all of which of course gave me one million more questions while i was doing the dishes. like -- inclusitivity 101 but if they hired chaplains with interfaith training at all levels would they start seeing more religiously and culturally diverse players. and was also wondering if, even though hmi claims to be non-denominational, what kinds of outreach they do for orthodox players like kostin (i assume) or vasilevskiy (mentioned in the article) because none of the language on their website felt ecumenical. and also what kind of spiritual care they offer players in player assistance -- i feel like it's not uncommon to hear about goalies finding religion and coming out of player assistance concurrently. and also the number of goalies themselves who are christian, which was particularly interesting to me, as in the article, most of the ones who self-identified didn't come to faith until adulthood or were deeply on the pro-league career track. i also think about like--like what are the ahl (or echl/sphl) chaplains doing for the players who were raised with prosperity gospel and the various threads associated with that

and these are all very fascinating trains of thought for me to chase bc i love thinking about how faith impacts our lives broadly and in my little hobbies specifically but what i kept getting stuck on is if the framing around spiritual care in the nhl is all christianity, who is providing spiritual care at each stop for nazem kadri, who is a practicing muslim