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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.
Debating the Meaning of Near Death Experiences
For many of us, tales of white lights, tunnels and journeys to other worlds offer hope – hope that death is not the end, hope that we will see friends and family who have died before us, hope that life has meaning beyond the length of our human days. And for scientists, near-death experiences tap into one of the great mysteries of our day: what is consciousness? Can the mind operate when the brain is off-line – and does that suggest a soul? Those are the questions we’ll wrestle with this week, with NPR’s former religion correspondent and author of Life Reimagined: the Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife, Barbara Bradley Hagerty.
We’ll talk with Dr. Jeffrey Long, founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, whose time in the trenches persuades him that there is more than this human existence, and skeptic, Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine who thinks that near death experiences are merely the trick of a dying brain. We begin with the story of Edward Salisbury, a man who has suffered, or enjoyed, three close calls with death.
On Heaven: What Different Faith Believe
For desert-dwelling Muslims, Heaven was a lush, green garden, filled with springs, rivers and flowing wine. For ancient Jews it was the site of their holy temple, rebuilt brand new after its destruction by the Romans. And for African-American slaves, Heaven was the place where “the first would be last, and the last would be first.” In our 2010 interview, journalist and author of Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, Lisa Miller explains why our image of eternity is shaped by our life on Earth now – a reflection of our hopes, anxieties and longings for justice.
