September 23 - The Nun on the Bus Meets the Pope at the White House; The Dark Side of Religious Freedom in America

We begin with the Pope’s visit to the White House today where 15,000 invited guests crowded into the south lawn to hear the Pope urge Americans to build a truly tolerant and inclusive society and to tackle the issue of global warming before it is too late. Sister Simone Campbell, a religious leader, attorney and poet who is the Executive Director of Network and the author of “A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community” joins us. She was at the White House today and we get an appraisal of how the Pope’s remarks on climate change, immigration, inequality and religious freedom were greeted as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics did not shy away from bringing up contentious political issues that are roiling the presidential primary debates and will no doubt come up in the Pope’s address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday.

Part 2

Then we look further into the issues of religious liberty which the Pope will be taking on in Philadelphia where he is meeting with conservative bishops to “celebrate and support the institutions of marriage and the family”. Following the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision we will explore whether there is too much, as opposed to too little religious freedom in the United States, an issue that is made painfully clear in the devastating new Showtime movie “Prophet’s Prey” that opens in Hollywood of Friday and nationwide in early October. The writer/director of this new documentary feature Amy Berg joins us in studio along with best-selling author Jon Krakauer, who is a producer and appears in “Prophet’s Prey” and is the author of “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith”. We will discuss how a cult of polygamous Mormons engaged in systematic slavery, child labor and the sexual abuse of minors, still flourishes today under the leadership of its self-declared prophet Warren Jetts who is serving a life sentence for sexual assault on a 12 year-old girl and a 15 year-old he impregnated, in a Texas prison from where he directs his “church’s” multi-million dollar activities.