Religion Dispatches
…“ in which a teacher was charged with giving lessons on human evolution in Tennessee, where it remained illegal to do so until 1967. When the play was written, the nation was in the grip of a recession and a Red Scare; playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee presented Scopes’ call to teach evolution as a sly protest against McCarthyism and the culture of fearful conformity it had wrought. As in Dover, Inherit the Wind put Darwin in the he…
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…based on stories you have told me, maybe even more-so at the University of Tennessee—classes include quite a few conservative evangelicals who take very particular, even rigid, stances toward the subject. I imagine that it’s a bigger factor in the Bible Belt than in most other places. How do you deal with this? For example, my New Testament class heard a student presentation on “Eschatology and the Kingdom of God….” MH: Will RD readers know what t…
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…y popular. Then in 1925, a young football coach was recruited to challenge Tennessee’s newly passed Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution. Scopes lost, and the Butler Act stayed on the books. Thanks to the dispatches of Baltimore Evening Sun columnist H.L. Mencken, much of the country viewed folks in Dayton, Tennessee, as backward hillbillies. However, even as many Americans were reveling in Mencken’s characterization of the “yoke…
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…ughout my formative years, but the boom-chicka-boom of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three. It was natural as a heartbeat. Cash had gone in and he had stayed—and every September 12 since he died, I think of him. Few musicians have been as successful as Johnny Cash. In a career-spanning six decades, he became more than a household name; he became a legend. What was behind this success? It wasn’t his skill as a musician, or his music industry savvy…
Read More…ames’ Gang”: “Word was brought to the Fifth Police Station to-night that a number of boys were using the Concord-street School-house for some unknown purpose, and a posse of officers was sent to investigate. The gang scattered at the approach of the police, and in their flight on drew a revolver and fired at Officer Rowan, without effect, however. William Nangle, age 14, and Sidney Duncan, age 12, were captured, but the other five or six escaped,…
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…Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.” Graham’s decision to leave Tennessee for Tampa may have been motivated less by theological scruples than by the allure of sunshine, but that transition symbolized a larger movement from the starchy fundamentalism of his childhood, characterized by comprehensive behavioral standards and strict separation from theological liberalism and the perils of “worldliness,” toward a more inclusive evangelicalis…
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…ic clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over whether a Tennessee high-school teacher could tell his students that humans had evolved (the jury ruled no). A couple of pages later, Coyne refers to “the persecutions of Galileo and John Scopes.” The conflation of the two is clumsy—and telling. Equating Scopes with Galileo is, at best, a display of historical ignorance; at worst, it’s an exercise in willful blindness. Galileo was an…
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…emoration—the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The Tennessee legislature as well as the Michigan House and the Washington House resolutions did manage to state that the Virginia Statute was a forerunner to the First Amendment and, in the case of Michigan, that the bill disestablished the Church of England, though they laded their resolutions with language about God and religion and how various Founding Fathers thought relig…
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…gram descriptions. Whatever his fate in these matters, Rapert epitomizes a number of trends on the Christian Right, here in the End Times. While the notion that the Christian Right is dead, diminished or in precipitous decline may never die, the movement nevertheless continues to grow and adapt to the ever-evolving religious and political landscape. Its strength has never been in the raw numbers of conservative evangelicals and conservative Cathol…
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…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…
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