Faith Works 5-23-2025

Faith Works 5-23-2025
Jeff Gill

As we vacation on Amity Island
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"Jaws" came out fifty years ago, and in the movie, Amity Island has a billboard celebrating "50th Annual Regatta — July 4th - 10th" which grounds the whole thing in history, kind of.

My high school basketball coach grew up on Martha's Vineyard, and he could not have loved "Jaws" more for the scenic tour of his old stomping grounds. I don't think he could have told you a thing about the plot of the thing, he just watched it multiple times to watch the scenery. Did he miss the point? He was entertained, and bought tickets, so everyone wins.

Monday is Memorial Day, and there will be celebrations and commemorations, and we will all miss the point in some ways. It is a day for remembrance — in Great Britain and Canada they have a Remembrance Day on Nov. 11, marking the end of World War I in 1918, which is also sometimes called Memorial Day (and we call Veterans Day here). Our day for memorials and remembrance of those who died in our nation's service goes back at least to 1868, and certainly in the fresh memory of the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths both North and South in that conflict.

So there is a solemnity to this weekend, and certainly to at least some part of Monday. Gen. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued his General Order Number 11 asking that veterans mark May 30 as a date to tend graves and honor the dead of the late conflict (it can easily be found online, and I think still rewards re-reading even if the language is as flowery as you might imagine for 1868). May 30 was Memorial Day up into the 1970s when we nudged many national observances to Mondays, in the ongoing creation of "weekends" as a civic reality.

Memorial Day weekend is also the beginning of summer, with schools letting out and camps opening and family vacations setting out. It can also be, for many parish clergy, a time to say goodbye to substantial amounts of their congregations, with cherished hopes that they'll see them again come Labor Day or after.

Honoring sacrifice, giving thanks to God for life, taking a day of rest: these all have their place in most religious traditions. We stir them in with patriotism, commercialism, and a frantic pursuit of leisure, if not happiness, and get the modern American summer. Memorial Day is one of the first casualties of this potentially toxic mix.

Longtime readers know around this point of the year I like to encourage people to visit places of worship while on vacation. It's so nearly counter-intuitive for our culture of recreation I feel compelled to keep mentioning it, even as I don't want to make it one more obligation you should feel as if you have to fulfill.

Going to church somewhere you've never been can really teach you things about your own faith community you'll never learn at home. It will make you appreciate things you didn't know you valued, and might even cause you to see why a minister or some other church leader wants to make certain changes. Plus being a stranger in worship will help you see strangers in your church very differently, and I suspect much more clearly.

The mayor of Amity said insistently "we need summer dollars!" His pursuits in the office you might say blinded him to other realities swimming off-shore. We need much each summer, to refresh, renew, restore. Just make sure you don't pursue your version of Amity's summer dollars to where you miss what you need to see right in front of you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to Memorial Day observances for many reasons. Tell him how you revitalize in the summertime at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-22-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 5-22-2025
Jeff Gill

Licking County's most remarkable collection of art
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Earlier in May I was describing to you here the steps in the process which led to the West Courtroom of the Licking County Courthouse as we have it today, beautifully restored and re-dedicated on May 1, 2025, which is "Law Day" each year.

We had a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court on the bench, along with the Common Pleas Judges on either side, and another dozen judges filling the jury box. I was honored to get to speak as part of those proceedings, helping put some context on the amazing art and decoration you can see there, much of it dating to 1903 to 1905, with some blanks filled in over the past year of restoration work.

If you've been in the massive and ornate West Courtroom (I won't ask why!) you know the ceiling is dramatic, but throughout living memory has been shrouded in lamp-black and cigar smoke from earlier times. The amazing oculus in the center, evoking the Pantheon ceiling in Rome, has been dim and shadowy for generation.

As one of the final stages of restoration of our county's courthouse, which needed work from the cupola on top to the walls and windows of this 1876 structure, the West Courtroom was painstakingly restored, by skilled professionals in art restoration. We've all learned fascinating things about the work done and what it represents; my part has been to anchor the work to create the plaster architectural elements, and of the attached murals and paintings, to a precise point in time, and also to some specific artists.

The "maestros" of this complex display of art in a functional space were the Bryant Brothers of Columbus, Ohio. They had started some years earlier in Canton, and moved to the center of the state as their work expanded, but they were interior designers on a major scale. Their portfolio included churches and cathedrals all over the Midwest, a number of palatial residences, and just a few courthouse commissions.

The Bryants didn't do the art, they hired the artists for the client, and put the pieces together in a harmonious whole, as interior designers do. On June 26, 1905, the county commissioners in their official minutes contracted with Bryant Brothers to finish the interior of the West Courtroom, and with August Roeder of Toledo to finish the flooring upstairs, soon after with an additional amount to complete the general contracting of the electrical work and finished carpentry of the space. The lighting design of the room was on the cutting edge of technology for 1905, even if the art was classical.

And classical barely begins to describe what the Bryant Brothers pulled together, which you can now see in bright, vivid colors again today. They employed an artist from Toledo, Ludwig Bang, about whom I've already written, who was the only one of the three main artists for the West Courtroom to actually visit Newark. Two more artists play a significant role: Adèle Bassi, with her studio in Florence, Italy just up the block from the Uffizi, and John Franklin Douthitt of New York City, with his studios above Fifth Avenue.

All three would come together in one place, thanks to the Bryants; each has a unique story — for which you'll have to come back and hear more!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's had a great time researching this little project, with more to share. Tell him about the art that inspires you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads of Bluesky.

Faith Works 5-16-2025

Faith Works 5-16-2025
Jeff Gill

Pope Bob from Dalton makes me smile
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Habemus papam: we have a pope!

I'm from northwest Indiana and my father spent his last two decades working in Hegewisch, a Chicago neighborhood that's about as far south as you can get, with Dalton the next one over. So there's a whole bunch about Robert Prevost's upbringing which I can relate to, even if he's six years older than I am.

His mother was the Cubs fan; he's a White Sox fan, which is a comfort to many on the South Side, I'm sure.

A short point, and a longer observation: first, there are some complaints on social media about all the attention to a Catholic pope "because not everyone belongs to his church." True, but as a non-Catholic myself, what a pope says is worth hearing. I may not agree with all his doctrine, but the papacy is a leadership office in the world which in its own way is as consequential as, say, the president of Russia or the premier of China.

My longer comment has to do with choosing to be the fourteenth Leo of the 267 popes since St. Peter. The new pope has clearly said it's meant as a nod to Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, born in 1810.

Leo XIII wrote a papal encyclical titled: "Rerum novarum." In English, "Rights and duties" or "Rerum novarum" in Latin, short for "the rights and duties of capital and labor."

"Rerum novarum" is significant far beyond the Roman Catholic Church in that coming out in 1891 this was one of the earliest comprehensive social, theological, and political responses to Karl Marx's "Das Kapital."

Both works were meant as responses to what was known in the Nineteenth Century as "the Social question." In brief, this is the challenge presented to Western societies in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Rural life could be poor, but endurable, in a medieval culture where the people of the land might have no money or wealth, but their garden plots and market exchange provided a relatively decent standard of living.

The late 1700s and early 1800s saw a shift to mechanization, a move to urbanization, and a working class developing living in cities on a wage-earning basis . . . and for many in this new industrial working class, poverty of a different sort than came from drought or pestilence and crop failure in the country.

The Social question asked what was to be done about industrial scale poverty; two hundred years after the development of nation-states, in 1848 there were popular revolutions all across Europe, centered in urban areas, forcing an accounting of how a government should respond to poverty. One was the Communist Manifesto of 1848, which was developed into a broader theory of capital and class consciousness and ultimately revolution by Marx in 1867.

Meanwhile, in places like Great Britain were debates between people like Gladstone and Disraeli who were united in saying "constitutional democracy will sort this out" with a social safety net of sorts; northern Europe tended towards more of what we call today a "welfare state." In the U.S. of this period, our response was to say "Go West, young man" and solve such socio-economic tensions with the frontier and homesteading.

Leo XIII said "there's another way." That's what "Rerum novarum" is, basically. An attempt with an eye towards eternity to talk about current tensions between labor and capital that is neither weighted towards revolution nor is it a faith in a welfare state to create a safety net. Without getting into further detail on Leo XIII's other way, what we've heard from Leo XIV is that in 2025, it's time for the Catholic Church and Christians in general to look at the lives of working class people in light of emerging technology once again, and look for "other ways."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got social questions aplenty. Tell him what yours are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.