“The Nuns, the Priests and the Bombs”: Film Screening and Panel

Please join Brown War Watch on February 11th, at 5:30 PM in Friedman Auditorium at 190 Thayer Street on Brown’s campus for a screening of The Nuns, the Priests and the Bombs, a documentary about daring Catholic anti-nuclear activists. A panel will follow featuring the film’s director, Helen Young, investigative journalist Alex Nunes, and activist Frida Berrigan. Admission is free.

Are they criminals or prophets sending a wake-up call to the world?
The Nuns, the Priests and the Bombs, which has been shown across the country including at the UN, follows several religious activists, even an 82-year-old Catholic nun, who risk long jail terms in their efforts to move the world away from the nuclear brink.
Since 1980, activists in lay and religious life have undertaken dramatic Plowshares protests, derived from the biblical injunction, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares,” incurring long prison sentences in an ongoing campaign to deter nuclear disaster. Two cases are documented: the July 2012 break-in at a site known as America’s “Fort Knox of Uranium” where the intruders were an 82-year old Catholic nun and two fellow peace activists, and the 2009 Plowshares action at a US naval base near Seattle, WA. The film follows the activists’ legal efforts to justify their actions under international law and highlights the power of their moral conviction.

We hope that you will consider joining us for this important event sponsored by the Department of Middle East Studies and Department of Religious Studies.

Speaker Biographies

Helen Young is an Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist who has forged a career as a filmmaker and writer by blending a passion for investigative reporting with a commitment to illuminating critical issues of the day. Over the course of an esteemed career, Helen has directed and produced documentary films on subjects ranging from the childhood obesity crisis in America and illegal gun trafficking, to the U.S. space program. She has won a National News Emmy award and three New York Emmys for her work, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, United Press International, the National Commission on Working Women, and the Red Cross. She is currently a contributor to Huffington Post.

Frida Berrigan is a writer, activist, and mother whose work has appeared in The Nation, Waging Nonviolence, and TomDispatch. She is the daughter of Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, a former priest and nun whose lifelong peace activism has made them central to the American anti-war movement. Frida’s book, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood, details growing up with her activist parents and her own experiences becoming a mother in a violent world. Frida lives in New London, Connecticut, with her husband Patrick and their three children.

Journalist Alex Nunes is an adjunct professor at Rhode Island College and a producer for The Public’s Radio, an NPR affiliate for Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts. He is well-known for his coverage of Rhode Island’s close alliance with Electric Boat, a General Dynamics subsidiary and manufacturer of military submarines. He is currently researching and interviewing sources for “Mosaic,” a 30-part podcast series on immigration told through the individual stories of local immigrants and their descendants. Alex is based in Westerly, Rhode Island.