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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.
Nones by the Numbers
Politicians want their votes, social movements want their support, and houses of worship want them back. Pollster Robert P. Jones traces the explosive growth of the religiously unaffiliated, AKA the ‘nones.’ His finding in broad brush strokes: they’re young, they’re white, and they rarely vote. And they now make up the largest “religious group” in the nation. Robert P. Jones is the author of The End of White Christian America and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute.
Grace and Grief without God
First, Katherine Ozment walks us through the moment she realized “nothing” wasn’t the right answer to her son’s question about their religious identity. She set out to discover just what that “something” meant for her and millions of other people finding community outside of houses of worship.
Then: Where do non-religious people go when they need a spiritual harbor? Producer Katie Dreyer attends a dinner party where young “nones” are writing their own instruction manual on grief. Her story originally aired in May, 2016. Katherine Ozment is the author of Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age.
Nuns Now: A New Kind of Cloistered
Nuns aren’t who you think they are. You might not even know when you’re in front of one…Like right now. If you’re listening to the show, you are listening to a nun. Our own Maureen Fiedler is a Catholic nun, a Sister of Loretto. But your chances of meeting a nun like Maureen are becoming smaller and smaller. There are fewer than 50,000 nuns in the United States today–that’s about 75 percent fewer nuns than in 1965. And so this week, we kick off our new series, Nuns Now, about the everyday lives of modern religious sisters.
We start with Sister Judy Murray, member of the Carmelite Nuns of Baltimore. She gives us a peek into her life of simplicity, celibacy, and obedience … and the occasional trip outside the convent.
