God Didn't Make Me No Monkey Man: An Evolutionary Biologist and a Humanist Discuss How to Discuss the Scopes Trial at 85

Paul Harvey

Readers of my entries on this blog (those of you who are still awake, at any rate) will know of my previous career as a biology major (and thanks a lot, Physics 201, for making me see that perhaps History was a better way for me to go), and my literary love of Darwin's Origin of the Species, which I've blogged about before.

HNN this week is featuring a great set of responses and reflections on the Scopes Trial and the issue of the tortured discussion of evolution in public discourse. No other scientific "theory," even those which would appear to pose major challenges to certain genres of biblical interpretation, invokes such passion and furor. There is no equivalent, in chemistry or molecular biology or even in physics for god's sake, to the various "Creationist" institutes and museum dotting the landscape. That fact has long puzzled me.

David Reznick's "An Evolutionary Biologist's Reflections on the Scopes Trial," notes that "A peculiar attribute of evolutionary biology is that, even though it is an arcane science, many people have opinions about it, much more so, I think, than any other science. Why?" He then goes on to detail some possible reasons, and at the end to ask for the help of humanists:

"Some historians and philosophers have helped by articulating how evolution fits in to the development of science, but also by dealing with the relationship between science and religion as a topic for the humanities classroom, rather than the science classroom. We need the help, so I encourage my colleagues in the humanities to expand these efforts."

Everett Hamner provides precisely that help in his terrific piece "A Humanist's Reflections on Evolutionary Biology." Our faithful blog readers will recall that just a bit ago Everett posted his reflections on William Brown's The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder.

In today's piece, Everett calls for classroom discussons to distinguish between science and scientism, to humanize scientists engaged in discovery, to "question bifurcations between the religious and secular," and to cultivate more careful readings of scriptures (plural), not their dismissal.

I would add that it wouldn't hurt humanist students to be required to take some more science classes (and, yes, vice-versa) so they can engage this discussion more knowledgeably, but that's just me.

On the latter point, the importance of cultivating careful readings of scriptures, Everett writes the following: To encourage this shift is merely to appreciate that setting the writings of an amazingly resilient ancient Near Eastern tribe or of a sixth-century Meccan revolutionary against a product of Victorian science is to compare apples and oranges. When people grasp the differences in purpose between the Bible, the Qur’an, and The Origin of Species, major stumbling blocks on the path to consilience begin to dissolve.

Yes, and yes -- another way of saying that we should help students cultivate a true historian's sense of the past.

And finally, I leave you with some unforgettable music: Eli Framer's God Didn't Make Me No Monkey Man, a country blues/string band classic you can listen to while reading Origins or taking a look at Jeffrey Moran's excellent article "Reading Race Into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science,and Fundamentalism," from the Journal of American History 90 (December 2003) (access to History Cooperative or J-Stor required).

The Soul Destroying Poison of the East; or, Why I'll Assume the Savasana Posture while Watching Mad Men

Paul Harvey

I’ve been meaning to get back to doing some yoga, something I did in years past, as a supplement to my normal exercise diet of web-surfing, Netflix-watching, fantasy-football-playing, and martini-glass-lifting. Every time I think of doing so, however, the same chilling thought comes to mind: what will Matt Sutton say? All the trash talk sure to come my way via my gmail from said Sutton should I announce my resumption of yoga as my spiritual discipline and complaining about how I can’t even hold the “Warrior Pose” for more than five seconds, pins me to my chair.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m lazy and would rather just stick to my normal exercise diet, as described above. I report, you decide.

Yoga, and the nexus of yoga with religion, physical fitness, commerce, and sex in America has received much attention lately, probably due to the appearance of a number of recent books detailing the history of the yoga

phenomenon. In this week’s New York Times Book Review (which, startlingly, actually had a number of well-written and engaging reviews which dealt at length and seriously with the subject matter at hand by people who knew something about the subject beforehand -- if only this would be more the norm), Pankaj Mishra reviews Stefanie Syman’s The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, and Robert Love’s The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Barbara Spindel also has a nice review of both works together here. Love focuses more on Pierre Bernard, described by Mishra as “one of the first of many indefatigable charlatans who popularized yoga.” Read the reviews for more fascinating detail on yoga’s Elmer Gantry.

Syman’s work follows a broader track, beginning with the influence of Indian philosophy on the Transcendentalists:

Both Emerson and Thoreau admired the “Bhagavad-Gita”; Emerson’s Oversoul resembles the Brahman, the all-inclusive, all-pervading Self of the Upanishads. However, neither Emerson nor Thoreau knew much about the physical-fitness side of yoga. The earliest Indian vendors of spirituality, like Swami Vivekananda, who lectured on Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, looked down on the asanas, or poses, of hatha yoga as a defective path to yoga’s goal: the union of the individual self with the divine Self.

Syman then follows the appearance of Indian religious figures at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, the struggles of yoga teachers and practitioners through the era of immigration restriction, and finally to the post-1945 recovery of yoga in America and its explosion with the counterculture and intense commercialization afterwards.

The story may appear to be a familiar one: the marketing of yet another religious tradition, and its watering down into a convenient calorie-burner for people on the go. Or at least for people who can tune out and turn off long enough to do so.

That’s certainly part of it, but Mishra points out that religious traditions, no matter how ancient, are always more mixed up than this, and that contemporary Americans were hardly the first to bring together religion, exercise, commerce, and sex:

The image of incorrigibly individualist and materialist Americans rummaging through ancient cultures in search of eternal youth, beauty and self-gratification has long provoked scorn. “Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue,” Carl Jung sternly declared, “is a spiritual fake.” But such a fetish of the “authentic” assumes that people in the country of yoga’s origin have upheld a timeless and unchanging yoga rather than practicing what Wendy Doniger, the distinguished historian of Hinduism, calls the world’s greatest “have your rice cake and eat it” religion.

It was in India that the tradition of Tantrism first exalted the human body as the source of this-worldly liberation. The generation of semi-Westernized Indians who brought about the renaissance of yoga in the early 20th century were themselves syncretists, combining ideas from both East and West. Even the physical aspects that dominate yoga today are partly reimports from the West. T. Krishnamacharya (the South Indian teacher of Indra Devi), B. K. S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois borrowed from gymnastic postures introduced to India by British colonialists.

Reading all this may be just enough to get me back into the bikram studio just down the street (everyone, promise not to tell Sutton). For now, it’s time to assume the savasana (corpse) posture on my lounger, take the first previous sip of an appropriately dry martini, and fire up some Mad Men. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Ted Haggard: He's Baaack!

Paul Harvey

Ted Haggard is back with a new church (as we blogged about here before). To no one's surprise, it has outgrown its original "barn" and has moved to downtown Colorado Springs for the time being. OUr local paper, with Mark Barna on the religion beat, reports on this (with my own usual "state the obvious" commentary) here, and there's video via CNN here. Barna's blog updates us here on the first service at the Pike's Peak Center downtown. Haggard is quoted as saying:

“This feels a bit like the Clampetts,” Haggard told his congregation, referring to the family in the old sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies” that moved from the Ozark Mountains to a California mansion. “We just got out of the barn and now we’re downtown.”

My only question is, in this scenario, who gets to play Jethro? And will there be a Mr. Drysdale?

In The Footsteps of William James: Conference Announcement

Paul Harvey

Matt Hedstrom of the University of Virginia send along this information about a conference on William James. For fuller information on this conference, click here.

In the Footsteps of William James

A Symposium on the Legacy – and the On-Going Uses – of James's Work

Organized by the William James Society and co-sponsored by the Chocorua Community Association and the Houghton Library at Harvard University

August 13-15, 2010: Chocorua, NH

August 16, 2010: Cambridge, MA

Schedule

Friday, August 13: Chocorua, NH
• 4:00 - 6:00 pm: Registration at Chocorua Public Library
• 5:30 - 7:00 pm: Welcoming reception at Runnells Hall
• 7:00 - 8:30 pm: Speaker

Saturday, August 14: Chocorua, NH
• 7:30 - 9:00 am: Breakfast and registration at Chocorua Public Library
• 10:00 - 11:30 am: Speakers
• 11:30 am - 1:00pm: Lunch (not provided) and seminar conversations
• 1:00 - 2:50 pm: Speakers
• 3:00 - 5:00 pm: Shuttle Bus from Runnells Hall to a guided tour of James-Peters Home
• 5:00 - 8:00 pm: Dinner (not provided)
• 8:00 - 10:00 pm: Concert at Chocorua Community Church, 40 Deer Hill Road (a few doors from Runnells Hall): "A Night To Remember… William James" featuring New Hampshire storytellers, folk musicians, and period music played by the Chocorua Cornet Band

Sunday, August 15: Chocorua, NH
• 8:00 - 9:00 am: Breakfast at Whittier House
• 9:00 - 10:00 am: Speaker
• 10:30 am - 12:20 pm: Speakers
• 12:30 - 2:00 pm: Lunch (not provided) and seminar conversations
• 2:00 pm - evening: Free time
Afternoon activities available: Self-guided tours of Tamworth and Chocorua, hiking on Mt. Chocorua, canoeing on Lake Chocorua, and NH story-tellers, folk musicians, and artists in Chocoura

Monday, August 15: Cambridge, MA
• 9:00 - 10:00 am: Registration in Houghton Library entrance
• 10:00 am - noon: Houghton Library Exhibit Opening, Linda Simon (Guest Curator)
• Noon - 1:20 pm: Harvard Faculty Club lunch (at site of former James family home)
• 1:30 - 3:20 pm: Speakers
• 3:30 - 5:00 pm: Tour of James's Cambridge
• 5:00 - 6:00 pm: Closing reception

The Sherrods and the Charades

Paul Harvey

The last day or two, it's been hard to avoid the ugly story of the pseudo-"journalist" Andrew Breitbart's use of and/or manipulation of a bit of heavily doctored video relating a series of events from 25 years ago to slander Shirley Sherrod (he claims he "only" meant to slander the NAACP -- whatever).

Normally such a typically dishonest smear against an employee of the Department of Agriculture (and the Dept. of Agriculture administration's unfortunate haste to act in response to the falsely manufactured story) would not by itself initiate a post here at a blog dealing with very different matters. Except that Shirley Sherrod happens to be married to Charles Sherrod, a person of great interest to civil rights historians and religious history scholars alike.

Over at HNN (a precis of a piece from Salon), Joan Walsh properly calls attention to the career of Charles Sherrod. As a seminary student, he was deeply involved with the Albany project and matters of justice in Southwest Georgia more generally. He's not nearly as well known as some other figures of that time in the history of civil rights, but researching my book Freedom's Coming I was taken with his writings from that period of struggle, and particularly with the work of the Student Interracial Ministry, a group of students from Union Theological Seminary (maybe other places as well, I would have to look that up again) who served in some of the darker corners of the South. Update: see the comments section where Ralph Luker provides a bit more explanation of and firsthand account about the SIM program.

Of the Ministry and Sherrod, I wrote:

Working within the “ideological arm of the southern way of life” could lead only to complete frustration or total compliance. Impetus for change would have to come from the outside. The Student Interracial Ministry offered to free churches from their straitjacket. In this three–year retrospective, Sherrod reported some halting progress:

I have seen the church moving, surging and falling, struggling to breathe, eager to learn the truth; I have seen it in stinking jail cells packed with people, singing and sweating people, brought before the Pilates of this day; I have seen the church under the stars praying and singing in the ashes of a burned down church building, in the winter shivering under a tent in the open country, in a home where people cried together without speech but with a common understanding; I have seen the church in a pool room. I have seen with my eyes whites protecting blacks with their bodies and blacks bleeding to shield whites from whites. I have seen ministers lead their congregation from Sunday service to the City Hall to condemn the state. I have seen ministers with three grades of education put Ph.D.s to shame.

As you can see from Sherrod's work here, anti-white racism is a terrible problem affecting us today, and it's wonderful of Breitbart et al to stand up against that malignancy. More seriously, if this fiasco helps resurrect and bring to light the careers of folks like the Sherrods, perhaps at least some things can work together for good -- even faux stories broadcast for politically manipulative purposes.

Wandering Souls in Pre-Civil War America

Paul Harvey

Earlier I had posted a notice about a new book by Scott Rohrer, Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. Sometime later we're going to feature a fuller and more extensive look at this work here at the blog, but in the meantime, to continue our early America series of posts this week, here's a review just up at Choice. The author's blog post about his work, which reflects on the material in the book and his family's own migration history, is here.

Rohrer, S. Scott Wandering souls: Protestant migrations in America, 1630-1865. North Carolina, 2010. 312p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780807833728, $39.95. Reviewed in 2010aug CHOICE

Rohrer (independent scholar) presents a persuasive case that the religious motivations for migration in American Protestantism have not been adequately studied, and proceeds to argue that a clearly symbiotic relationship exists between religion and migration. The wider American cultural environment of wanderlust was an open invitation for Protestant seekers to pick up and leave in their search for spiritual fulfillment, their quest for Christian community, or their thirst for social reform. Rohrer examines motivations for migration (including the role of internal dissent, persecution, and utopianism) and patterns of migrations (westward from New England, southward from Pennsylvania, and northwesterly from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia). Specific migrations include the 17th-century migration of Puritans under Thomas Hooker, the 18th-century migration of Virginia Anglicans under Devereux Jarratt, and the 19th-century migrations of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Moravians, Methodists, dissenting Baptists, Inspirationists, and Mormons. The result is a book that both widens and deepens readers' understanding of American Protestantism and the motivations of migration in shaping it.Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers/faculty. --B. M. Stephens, emeritus, Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County Campus

Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco

Paul Harvey

Apparently this is religion in early/colonial America week here at the blog! Recently I had occasion to re-survey some of the literature about the California missions, especially one of my favorite recent works of scholarship, Steven Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850, for my money the most thorough scholarly study of the subject, full of painstakingly constructed data sets from mission records -- the book is reviewed at length, and quite thoughtfully, here.

Religious studies scholar Quincy Newell's new book on native life and religious practice at a California mission is now out, and it came to my attention via the Choice review reprinted below. Her work brings ethnographic and religious studies methods to bear on the subject, and zeroes in on one mission in particular. Another longer and more extensive review may be found here; the money quote there, for our purposes here: "She postulates that many Native people chose baptism and mission life over continued residence in their traditional villages in order to enhance their spiritual power within their society and maintain the prestige of ever-weakening kinship networks. This interesting and thoughtful analysis lends new a perspective to the literature."

Below is the review from Choice. Be sure also to check out Quincy Newell's contributions at the blog Religion in the American West.

Newell, Quincy D. Constructing lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic colonists, 1776-1821. New Mexico, 2009. 267p bibl index afp; ISBN9780826347060, $39.95. Reviewed in 2010aug CHOICE.

Despite the passage of 175 years since the last Spanish California mission was secularized in 1834, these Hispanicized Indian communities continue to provoke contentious scholarly debate regarding the nature and intent of the Franciscan missionary enterprise more generally. With cultural critique all the rage, it is no wonder that indigenous voices have been lost in the fray. By contrast with earlier such treatments, religious studies professor Newell (Univ. of Wyoming) delivers a culturally nuanced, meticulously researched, and thought-provoking narrative treatment for contextualizing voices silenced in earlier works regarding Native lifeways in the California missions. Newell's narrative delivers brilliant insights and exceptionally fine-grained readings of both Costanoan Indian and Hispanic colonial perceptions, beliefs, and cultural norms. Deploying a narrative approach borne of historical fictions and the reconstituted life histories of such memorable Costanoan converts as Pismote, a disaffected though perceptive young female left to ponder the contradictions of both the Spanish empire and the Catholic faith, readers ultimately learn to "see" the surreal world of the Costanoan people and the Hispanic Catholic colonists with whom they held court. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Al levels/libraries. -- R. G. Mendoza, California State University, Monterey Bay