The 2025 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) concluded its lecture series on October 29, 2025.
The Trouble Begins and The Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the support of the Mark Twain Foundation and generous gifts from individual donors.
Dwayne Eutsey presented “’I have always preached’: Mark Twain and Liberal Religion.”
“The reports of Mark Twain’s atheism have been greatly exaggerated.” So begins “There is No Humor in Heaven”: Mark Twain and Religious Liberalism, Dwayne Eutsey’s intriguing new book that significantly challenges prevailing assumptions about Twain’s hostility toward religion. Eutsey will present an overview of the book, focusing on religious liberalism’s lifelong influence on Mark Twain’s life and writing. Published by the University of Missouri Press, Eutsey’s book traces the influences of various liberal religious movements of Twain’s era on his writing and religious beliefs, ranging from Freemasonry, Universalism, and Unitarianism to the more genteel liberal Christianity of Elmira and Hartford, and ultimately Free Religion and aspects of esoteric Hinduism.
As a frustrated Gospel preacher himself, Twain’s many friendships with several liberal clergy throughout his life were instrumental in bringing these influences into his life and writing: the “radical evangelical” Franklin Rising in Nevada; Thomas Starr King and other prominent Unitarian ministers in California; Horace Bushnell, Thomas K. Beecher, and Joe Twichell in Elmira and Hartford; and the radical Emerson protege Moncure Conway, whose interest in Hinduism may have influenced Twain’s controversial final novella, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.
About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series – In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or on Elmira College’s campus. In 2016, CMTS expanded the series, creating the Park Church Summer Lectures Series. All lectures are free and open to the public.