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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.
Is that Radioactivity or the Light Within?
Toward the end of World War II, Ralph Steinhardt’s father became one of hundreds of experts tasked with developing an atomic bomb at a secret laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. According to Steinhardt, every night, his father threw away his clothing because it was radioactive. Growing up, Steinhardt was torn over his father’s role in building the bomb, and eventually he turned to Quakerism to find peace… and forgiveness. Ralph Steinhardt is now a professor of law and international affairs at George Washington University Law School.
I am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds
J. Robert Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. It was there, on July 16, 1945, that he and his fellow scientists conducted the Trinity Test – the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. But to Ray Monk, Oppenheimer was also a secular Jew, a student of the Bhagavad Gita, and at times, a puzzlement. Ray Monk is a British philosopher and the author of Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center.
A Nuns Anti-Nuclear Crusade
Until a few years ago, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee was considered one of the most secure nuclear sites in the world. But that changed in the summer of 2012, when three people broke in, using hammers and lock-cutters from a local hardware store. They were peace activists: a house painter, a Vietnam War veteran, and… an 82-year-old Catholic nun. Reporter Dan Zak, author of Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age, tell us the story.
