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Every Sunday at 3:00amAbout the Show
Inspired
Inspired is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality. Each week we offer you analyses of the big headlines alongside lesser-told stories – those of Orthodox Jewish artists and African-American atheists, Muslim feminists and spiritual seekers. Through these stories, a rough sketch of our country’s religious landscape begins to emerge. It’s a marketplace of beliefs and ideas too complex for sound bites, and too important to ignore.
The Ultimate Test of Faith
Jehovah’s Witnesses avoid blood transfusions because of the Biblical mandate to “abstain from blood.” Christian Scientists understand sickness as an illusion that can be corrected through prayer. It’s one thing for an adult to choose spiritual approaches to healing, but what if a child’s life is at stake? We talk to two guests: a medical doctor who studies vaccinology, and a former Christian Scientist who says she was persuaded by her church not to take her dying son to the hospital in the late 1970s. Featuring Rita Swan, founder of Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD) and Dr. Paul Offit, author Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine.
“It’s a Religion of Choice”: A Christian Scientist’s Perspective
Christian Scientists believe that illness is a spiritual problem, not a physical one, and that it can be eliminated through careful thoughts and prayers. Phil Davis was the national spokesperson for the Church of Christ, Scientist from 2004-2010. When we spoke to the former spokesperson for the church back in 2009, he told us that Christian Scientists would never insist that parents forgo medical treatment for a sick child, and that their religion does not require believers to avoid all modern medicine.
Nuns Now: On the Frontlines
Continuing our Nuns Now series, we talk to Sister Kathleen Erickson about how she assumed as a girl she would get married and live on a farm… and then became a Sister of Mercy instead. Deeply concerned about justice, peace and the poor, her work has taken her to immigration detention centers, to scruffy border towns, and even into police custody as she protested nuclear weapons. She represents a kind of religious activism popularized in movies like “Dead Man Walking,” and she says her work has also been an education in the long-term consequences of U.S. policy in Central America.
