While Georgia and other states are restricting the right to vote, Kentucky is expanding it. Here is Tim Elfrink at The Washington Post: As Republicans in more than 40 states have pushed bills to restrict voting after former president Donald Trump’s November...
Kentucky
Today on the campaign sign front
A reader sends this along. I think it sums up the troubling moral contradiction at the heart of American politics today. I also recommend Lisa and David Swartz’s political sign photo essay from Wilmore, Kentucky.
VOX Profiles Wendell Berry
Hope Reese has written a nice introduction to Wendell Berry and his place-centered, agrarian ideas. Here is a taste: Bill McKibben’s environmental activism was spurred after his wife gave him a copy of Berry’s 1979 essay collection Home Economics, which offered...
Kentucky’s Christian Right Governor Matt Bevin is Out
Apparently last night’s visit by Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell did not help Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. As David Axelrod just said on CNN, Trump would not have gone to Kentucky is he did think Bevin was going...
Satanic Exorcism or Church Picnic?
This image has been making the rounds on social media: Actually, this image has probably been photo-shopped. Here is the original: Read more about this image at the Library of Congress....
When a School Shooting Shifted the National Debate on Guns
Saul Cornell, the best historian on guns and the Second Amendment working today, tells us about an 1853 school shooting in Louisville, Kentucky. Here is a taste of his piece at Politico: Though little remembered now, the first high-profile school shooting...
Wendell Berry Defends the University Press of Kentucky
Kentucky governor Matt Bevin wants to close the University Press of Kentucky. Agrarian writer and novelist Wendell Berry, who lives on a farm in Henry County, thinks Bevin’s budget proposal is “petty and barbaric.” Writing in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Berry defends...
Wendell Berry’s California Sojourn
Matthew Stewart is a Ph.D candidate in American history at Syracuse Univesity. In his recent piece at “Boom California,” he explores the agrarian writer Wendell Berry‘s decision to leave his home state of Kentucky for the creative writing program at...
Today’s Religion News Service Commentary: “Kentucky’s shrewd move to promote a Christian nationalist agenda”
Regular readers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home will be familiar with a longer version of this piece. Here is a taste of a shorter version syndicated today through Religion News Service: (RNS) Matt Bevin, the governor of Kentucky, recently...
Note to the Students: Profs Work Late During Final Exam Week
Some students will do just about anything to get an “A” on a final exam. The Lexington Herald Leader is reporting that a University of Kentucky student climbed through ceiling ducts to a professor’s office to steal a statistics exam. ...
A Baptist Pastor and Church History Professor in Kentucky Defends the NEH
John Inscore Essick is a co-pastor at Port Royal Baptist Church in Henry County, Kentucky and teaches Christian History at the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky. But more importantly, he is a regular reader of The Way of Improvement Leads Home!...
The Author's Corner with Craig Thompson Friend
Craig Thompson Friend is CHASS Distinguished Graduate Professor of History and Director of Public History at NC State University. This interview is based on his new book, Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West (University...
Image of the Day
Creekside Baptism–Primitive Baptist Church of Morehard, KY–August1940. Source...
Some Quick Thoughts on the Kim Davis Case
In case you haven’t heard, Rowan County Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because it violates her Christian beliefs.I appreciate Davis’s religious-inspired convictions about marriage. As long as religious liberty is part of the...
The Author’s Corner With Richard Traylor
Richard C. Traylor is Professor of History at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. This interview is based on his new book Born of Water and Spirit: The Baptist Impulse in Kentucky, 1776-1860 (University of Tennessee, 2015). JF: What led you to...
What Rhymes with Alison Lundergan Grimes?
Mitch McConnell is pulling out all the stops. It did not take long before the Kentucky senator took to the offensive against Alison Lundergan Grimes, his opponent for re-election in 2014. Grimes announced her candidacy for the Kentucky senate seat […]