History, literature, philosophy, the arts and religion are fields within the humanities. According to the National Humanities Center , “the humanities help us understand and interpret the human experience, as individuals and societies” [1] . The National Humanities Center, founded in the mid-1970’s is a collaborative sponsored by some 38 major universities including Princeton, Harvard and Yale that studies and prepares humanities resources for teachers. A section of their website is called Divining America: Religion in American History [2] .  This section contains essays written by humanities scholars about religion in America, organized by century. The essays all follow the same format. Beginning with a topic like “the First Great Awakening” or “Native American Religion in Early North America” or “The American Jewish Experience”, for examples, each essay begins by explaining what major scholars have written about the topic. Usually several viewpoints are presented to illustrate th...

  The oft quoted saying that history is written by the victors is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill and sometimes to Machiavelli. It can be disputed and is losing its claim to accuracy in this post-colonial world in which increasingly all lives and voices, particularly black, brown and indigenous lives matter. Each week the Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project features a famous Kentucky Christian on our Facebook page. We are intentionally researching and then portraying men and women from each race and ethnicity that has impacted the history of Kentucky with their lives who gave clear credit to their Christian faith for their achievements. It is significantly more difficult to find written records of Kentucky women than men. It is most difficult to find written records of Kentucky’s African American women. Effie Waller Smith is one such woman. Her story and her perspective on the early events of the twentieth century are woven through her poems. They are writ...

As you present facts about the Christian religion in the K-12 Public School classroom, it is important to remember that Christianity is not just a Western religion. In fact, its origins are anything but Western. Here are some dates and statistics about the spread and current reach of the largest religion in the world [1] . The first believers in the Christian message were Jews living in Jerusalem. Christianity spread to Europe by around 40 C.E. However, it took until the 1400’s for the Christian message to reach all of Europe. Today, around 562,000,000 Europeans say that they are Christians. Christianity also began to spread in Asia by around 40 C.E. There have been Christians in India since 52 C.E. There have been Christians in China since 781 C.E. There have been Christians in Japan since 1549. Today, about 365,000,000 Asians say that they are Christians. Many Christians who live in Asia have been and, even today, are being persecuted, put in jail and even killed because of their...

By Lesley Barker Today is Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2020, in the United States following a highly contested presidential campaign in a super-charged season fraught with the COVID-19 pandemic and a new wave of civil rights protests and counter-protests throughout the country. Without exception, teachers all over Kentucky will be discussing the election, its procedures and its results for the next several days if not weeks. This blog post does not deal with the 2020 election per se. Instead, we will consider how three people of faith from the past three hundred years have spoken out about voting: John Wesley, Mary E. Britton and Martin Luther King, Jr. Wesley addressed the behavior of the voters in the late eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, Britton used biblical arguments to lobby for woman’s suffrage. In the mid twentieth century, King itemized what the African American vote would change for that community while promising that even if the effort to achieve f...