Religion in Kansas Oral History Project
Kansas is religiously a microcosm of the world. All of America’s largest religious families – Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, and so on – are well represented, but so are a legion of less populous groups, including not only such familiar names as Jews and Amish and Muslims and Buddhists, but also Swedenborgians, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Pagans, Lawsonians, and Babsonians, to name only a few.
The Religion in Kansas project seeks to record and preserve representative voices from as many as possible of the highly diverse religions found in our state. It began in the fall of 2009, with University of Kansas students fanning out across the state to interview dozens of members of a broad sample of religions. As time and resources permit, we hope to add new voices regularly, and to transcribe the interviews we already have. We hope to update this website frequently.
The Project in the News
"Students in Tim Miller's Religion in Kansas class are finding out just how big a role faith has played -- and continues to play -- in the lives of ordinary residents in the Sunflower State." - The Topeka Capital-Journal
"The idea, says KU professor Tim Miller, who is running the class, is to create an extensive database that documents where religion in Kansas has been and where we are going. To do that, Miller says, the students working on the project must cull together what they can before the information dies out." - Lawrence Journal-World
“I got to thinking, ‘what are we losing?’ ” said Miller. “And we’re losing everything of a certain age, or most of it anyway. We have a number of really unusual religious stories in Kansas. We’ve had some that are already too far in the past to capture through people, but more are recent and not very well documented. Religion is a huge part of the lives of a whole lot of people in Kansas — and preserving that for the future is great.” - The Oread KU Employee Newsletter