What the Scopes Trial Meant: Bryan, the Modernists, and Science Edward B. Davis, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science, Messiah University (Reposted with permission from BioLogos.)   This July marks the one hundredth anniversary of the most famous event in the history of American religion and science, the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee high school. The rookie teacher was convicted of violating a new state law prohibiting public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.” Ironically, both the prosecution and the defense wanted a conviction. Responding to a solicitation from the American Civil Liberties

ISSR 2025 Conference Report Tim Middleton (University of Oxford) and Fraser Watts   The ISSR’s 2025 conference was hosted at Stanton House Hotel in the Wiltshire countryside, from 30 June to 3 July. The surrounding parkland—complete with lake, woodland, and fields of sheep—proved a fitting setting for the ISSR’s new focus on ecological concerns. The conference itself—entitled ‘Ecology between Religions and Sciences: Minds and Bodies in Nature’—included seven keynote lectures, two interfaith symposia, and several short paper sessions. Mike Hulme (University of Cambridge) opened the conference with a lecture on ‘Climate, Ecological, and Social Crises—Scientific and Religious Perspectives’, offering an overview of interactions between religion and ecology. Hulme noted how religion is often absent from conversations about climate change. But he argued that religions are of the utmost

WHAT IS “SPIRITUAL” IN SPIRITUAL PRACTICE? - THE EMPIRICAL QUESTION OF MEASURING WELLBEING EFFECTS PRODUCED BY SPIRITUAL PRACTICES. Harris Wiseman   A vast amount of research suggests that spiritual practices offer a range of health and wellbeing benefits. For example, a recent systematic overview of the spiritual practices and wellbeing literature (Koburtay et al. 2022) observed that, in the workplace at least, “belongingness, connectedness, virtuous-ness, deeper meanings of existence, and self-reflexivity are important for enhancing workers' psychological wellbeing” (pgs. 349-350), as are “prayer and reciting scripts” and the availability of spaces which allow or facilitate them (ibid.). Likewise, there is an emphasis on the moral values involved in relating spiritual practices to wellbeing. Values like “benevolence, integrity, justice, mutuality, respect, and trust are important” (ibid.) for enhancing wellbeing.