Are 'RELIGIOUS FAITH' & 'HUMANITIES' separate or overlapping terms?

After reading McClay’s article, I do agree that the functional role of the Humanities is actually to save us from losing our humanity, but find it crucial and un-ignorable that religious beliefs have the exact same capacity and purpose.

It was important that McClay initially addressed the issue of the humanities as being viewed as ‘fluffy’ ‘pretty ideas’. This oversimplified view of frilly uselessness is quite widespread. As a science major, I had little grasp on the meaning of the ‘Humanities.’ I admittedly wondered; What meaningful and useful place in this world- besides in the university setting- could a History or English major possibly fall into, other than “devoted secondary-school teachers” (38)? I felt that McClay’s explanation did a great job of dispelling the idea that the humanities are ‘intellectual finger-painting’ (36).

McClay’s article ended up focusing a lot of urgency on our world moving “closer to the technologies of a posthuman future” (36). While reading this article, I identified with the concern over the distinction between human and animal in the progression of scientific knowledge. However, McClay seemed to think concern with that distinction is already old news and what the humanities will be most concerned with is science taking us to a place where we will eventually not even be truly human.

The article left me agreeing that the humanities is the area of knowledge that will need to rise up and assert its stand to protect human beings from the ravaging amoral expansion of scientific technology and knowledge. It left me with a newfound acceptance of the necessity of the humanities, for surely I don’t want science to steal away what makes us human.

But it also left me largely confused with what the role of religion is in all of this. Do religious beliefs fall into the term ‘humanities’? I find that in several instances of the article, sincere religious faith would perfectly do everything that McClay said was the purpose and role of the humanities.

McClay does address religion. He points out that foundations of the humanities took much shape during the times of the Early Church. He mentions the developing humanities having characteristics that were both secular and religious.

McClay mentions Matthew Arnold, who showed that the humanities were viewed as a “substitute for religion in the formation, education, and refinement of humanity’s sentiments and moral sensibilities” (40). I certainly agree that both religion and the humanities are concerned with “the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature” (40).

Therefore, I do not understand the usefulness of the humanities to a person who faithfully and wholeheartedly finds the meaning of human life in non-secular, out-of-this-world places.