The centennial of the Scopes trial has come and gone. For at least this calendar year, the print media gave substantial attention to what happened in and outside the Rhea County Courthouse in July 1925. Commentators focused on whatever they believed…
The Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial isn’t done shaping America
If the Scopes “Monkey” Trial is discussed nowadays, the tone usually is pejorative. The events of July 1925 — in which a small-town substitute teacher was charged with a misdemeanor for teaching evolution in a public high school — are…
Religious attacks on science
The current MAGA evangelical attacks on science threaten to make America less safe, less healthy and much dumber. This anti-science compulsion is no surprise. Evangelical Christianity in the United States has rejected science at least since Charles Darwin. There is…
Getting over fundamentalism
Forty years after that long hot summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tenn., where the Scopes “Monkey Trial” was held, Southern Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney vividly recounted his memories. His parents were daily readers of the Knoxville News Sentinel, which claimed…
Tired of put-downs, Tennessee town corrects the record with play about the Scopes trial it hosted
A small town in eastern Tennessee courted national publicity and attention a century ago when local leaders planned a test trial over the teaching of evolution in public schools. What they got from the eight-day Scopes trial was more than they bargained…
Scopes at 100: The lasting legacy of the trial over human origins
Tensions between religion and science erupted in a hot and humid courtroom in Dayton, Tenn., 100 years ago this month. Fundamentalist celebrity William Jennings Bryan squared off against agnostic attorney Clarence Darrow in the trial of high school teacher John…
The Scopes monkey trial took place 100 years ago, but the fight isn’t over
They called it the “monkey trial.” It was supposed to be a publicity stunt.
The bathroom battles come to the U.S. Capitol
Al Mohler is proof that you can dress a fundamentalist in a $3,000 suit and he’s still going to come off like a sweaty William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes monkey trial. The ever-well-dressed and ever-opinionated Mohler slapped down the…
Of gay penguins, the Grand Canyon, the Ark and the Scopes trial
As the 100-year anniversary of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial approaches, the scientific community has had an entire century to explore our world and then sharpen and share their discoveries through peer review. But young earth creationists are still stuck…
A hundred years after the Scopes trial, not much has changed
If you haven’t heard about the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn., that is about to change. We are rapidly approaching the centennial of that messy affair, and books and articles on the subject already are starting to appear. Any…
Fundamentalism is not the only religious voice unless we give up
The Psalmist writes: “Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.” Using the tools of biblical criticism, we…
Tennessee legislators turn back the clock to Jim Crow time
The recent actions of the Tennessee Legislature to expel two Black Democratic representatives scream for answers. Why would members of the Republican Party, who have spent the past seven years swearing on a stack of Bibles, sometimes held upside down,…