Faith Works 6-12-2026

Faith Works 6-12-2026
Jeff Gill

Our relationships with our new machine overlords
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My beard-trimmer is some twenty years old, and while I’ve cared for it well, I think, it’s starting to show its age.

Let’s just say I went to a big box store to check out my options (it doesn’t matter which one). I found where such items are stocked, and ran into one of the less cheery signs of our modern era, a large case with locked clear fronts across it.

Inside were more options than I had anticipated, at least forty or more. They were cheap and costly, colorful and monochrome, some multi-purpose and others very precisely meant for specific functions. And the boxes were, as I mentioned, behind some kind of plexiglass and not all square with the front, so I crouched and peered and squinted, my eyes being twenty years older than when I first bought one of these, too.

Finally, a crew member came over to unlock the case… and stood next to me. Right next to me. Thisclose. I reached out, picked up a box, and the staffer got closer. I set it down, they backed away. A little.

You know how this ends. I stopped looking, thanked the crew member, and left, thinking “I’m going to look online.” Maybe that’s what they want. It’s less ideal, to me, than holding the box and looking directly at the item, but in context, I’d rather go home and open the laptop.

What does this have to do with artificial intelligence, which is where I left you all last week? Pope Leo XIV has some concerns about how AI influences how we relate not to machines, but to people. I think he has some good points in “Magnifica Humanitas.” Our relationships with devices can slop over into how we deal with actual human beings in front of us, and I was thinking about that as I felt uneasy about the person wedged up next to me as I bought, or didn’t buy, an item in a brick-and-mortar store. People make demands on us and have expectations which bots and droids do not. It is easier to review our consumer choices in a human-free zone, but what does that say about the human connections we defer or decline by retreating into them?

My equally uneasy response to these thoughts is as a historian. Reading about Newark, Ohio between about 1904 and 1914 is fascinating, among other reasons, for how the downtown area went in one decade from all horses to no horses. The shift was dramatic, decisive, and absolute. Once World War I is the dominant story, interurban electric streetcars and horseless carriages control transportation. Livery stables and old-fashioned teamsters, which is to say those men who knew how to control teams of horses to pull heavy loads, had to adjust and adapt; private barns behind family homes quickly became garages. In 1922, the use of teams of draft horses to pull loads up the hill to where Swasey Chapel was being constructed was already a bit of an anachronism, never to be seen again on a commercial scale.

And I can imagine people saying in 1911 or 1912: these “auto-mobiles” are a bad idea. People, especially the young, benefit from the relationship with horses they have, the responsibility they bear for caring and combing and feeding these living creatures each night and every morning. A motor vehicle is not the same at all! You can defer care and put off “feeding” it, and you lose the habits and patterns of a living engine for transportation.

They’d be right, wouldn’t they? Something is lost in that transition. Yet looking back, what could have stopped it? We left horses and buggies behind, and moved into the automotive age.

Does that mean we simply welcome our new AI overlords? There are important differences in the two case studies, but some similarities, ones that make me, well, uneasy.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s going to stay on this topic for one more week, as you can tell. Tell him what the answer is at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 6-25-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 6-25-2026
Jeff Gill

Two centuries and a half this June, in Philadelphia
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Before the Declaration of Independence could be written and amended and approved, there had to be a motion.

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia would make it, friend of Patrick Henry and Sam Adams, on June 7, 1776. Before the Continental Congress he moved "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Yes, this man’s cousin “Light-horse Harry” Lee would be the father of Robert E. Lee. Irony is a primary element in our history; get used to it.

On June 11, the Continental Congress appointed a "Committee of Five"  consisting of John Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson, neatly balanced between north and south with Virginia the pivot point in between. Technically, these five men drafted the Declaration of Independence, but as we know Jefferson drafted it, while Adams and Franklin made some changes to it. Our nascent Congress did not reconvene until July 1, 1776.

They approved Lee’s resolution as presented on July 2 (12 votes aye, New York abstaining, long story), which is the source of John Adams’s famous letter of that date to Abigail, his wife, saying “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Yet Congress, as is their wont, fiddled and diddled and modified odd phrases and moved around punctuation for three days. It was not until the Fourth of July that they officially adopted the Declaration of Independence we know now, and sent it to the printer’s office. The National Archives tell us the final form was “engrossed on parchment” only on July 19, 1776, and signed actually in the first days of August. Ask Nicolas Cage when the map was drawn on the back in lemon juice…

The true point, the serious observation, is this: they spent weeks getting it right. It was not one man, flawed or inspired as you might hope or believe; this was not a quick impulse out of mass emotion at work quickly rushed into print. Years of struggle were distilled into weeks of deliberation and crafting, in words and phrases with centuries of precedent behind them, in part going back to the Magna Carta itself in 1215. References to nature, and nature’s god, to a creator, and to how rights are self-evident, all had the weight of history behind them. It was not just the eruption of passions, but the end result of well-developed considerations, that ended up on that page now enshrined at the National Archives.

We, the people, had representation and deliberation working on our behalf in Philadelphia that long ago summer. We may still be thinking about how those ideas actually work in practice, but what we celebrate this year is the enduring legacy of the intention and action behind those words in 1776, continuing today “with liberty and justice for all.”


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s moved by what they did at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in 1776 and in 1787. Tell him your America 250 thought at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 6-11-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 6-11-2026
Jeff Gill

America Goes Outdoors
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As part of our ongoing programming around America 250-Ohio, and for Granville in particular, I’m going to be greeting people on Wednesday and Saturday, June 17 & 20, at 9:00 am in Opera House Park.

The theme for the month of June all over the state is “America Goes Outdoors,” and I will talk briefly about our local history around parks and outdoor recreation, then lead an expedition to climb to the summit of Sugar Loaf just to our west.

A park in Granville since 1896, with a monument part of the village centennial celebrations in 1905 on the very top, Sugar Loaf is part of a movement to parks and open space preservation which rippled across Ohio  after 1891, and the state’s purchase of Fort Ancient near Lebanon.

Before that we had village commons, meant as much for sheep and geese as for picnics or relaxation, and the rural cemetery movement was a move to having open areas for strolling and reflection on the edge of industrial cities, starting in New England before the Civil War, coming to Granville & Newark shortly afterwards with Maple Grove & Cedar Hill respectively. But a park as a “park” was a new idea in the 1890s. The whole concept of “national parks” didn’t get a structure to it until 1916; in that same year Indiana launched a state park system, which Ohio didn’t do until 1949.

In fact, on August 20th at 7:00 pm I will be offering a talk about the “preservation history” of the Newark Earthworks at the Octagon’s visitor center off 33rd St. in Newark, where I’ll share a bit more about how we in Licking County, and in part Granville, has been ahead of the curve on parks and outdoor recreation. But that night won’t include climbing a hill…

If you want to just come for the brief program at 9:00 am on June 17 & 20 to Opera House Park, you are more than welcome to do only that. I do hope we have a goodly crew to ascend to the summit of Sugar Loaf, though, and offer three cheers to parks and preservation and the out-of-doors, as local residents have enjoyed for many years. Before the 1890s, outdoors was where you went to work, to chop wood, hunt for game, even to make your way to an outhouse.

Since the 1890s, with electricity and automobiles and, yes, flush toilets, our relationship with being outside has changed. Outdoor recreation is a huge part of our state economy, and an aspect of our lives we know we need more of. Exercise, fresh air, and contact with nature isn’t something we get while pumping water at the well or from churning butter in the farmyard: we have to do so intentionally.

But we all need a little more time outdoors; I think we all acknowledge that. This June for America 250-Ohio we’re making a small down-payment on what we owe ourselves, as well as paying a debt of gratitude to our ancestors to saw fit to set aside some places like Sugar Loaf for later generations to enjoy.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s hiked the Sangre de Cristos in New Mexico and across the canyons of Zion in Utah, but Sugar Loaf is special. Tell him where you like to hike at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 6-5-2026
Jeff Gill

Artificial humanity in actual life and everyday faith
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Pope Leo XIV issued the first encyclical letter of his papacy, entitled “Magnifica Humanitas.” It’s easy to find online; the text is some 40,000 words, and in 12 point type at double space about 150 pages. You could call it a short book, but one with some heavy thinking from the first line:

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

If you’re wondering what an encyclical letter is and how it fits into the teaching role of the Catholic Church, the pope covers that ground for you, too. He’s talking about the social doctrine of the faith as he is interpreting it for our present age, and within that condition you see something of what an encyclical is. Such a document is not meant to express enduring truth as much as to apply what the church teaches to the times we find ourselves in.

Right now, that’s AI, artificial intelligence. Computer driven intelligence of a sort which can perform administrative tasks and do analysis in a flash, which threatens to collapse and consolidate entry level work of all sorts, especially in the knowledge space. Pope Leo reminds his readers that esteemed predecessors, like another Leo his choice of papal name was clearly meant to evoke, wrote entire encyclicals about social issues, like “Rerum Novarum” in 1891.

In a sense, “Magnifica Humanitas” is a series of footnotes to “Rerum Novarum,” which is itself the basis for most Catholic social teaching to the present day. Pope Leo XIII in the Nineteenth Century wanted to address the relationship of labor and capital investment, and the duties and responsibilities between governments and their people.

That previous Leo took no little criticism from secular leaders asking who the pope thought he was to comment and command in the world of business and employment, and the current Leo has had much the same response. But this non-Catholic thinks both of them are just doing their job, whether elected officials or the chief executive officers of the world agree or no.

It is interesting: if the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Ecumenical Patriarch of Orthodoxy, or any other Christian communion’s leader were to issue an authoritative teaching document on matters of technology and justice, I doubt it would roil the waters much. The Bishop of Rome, as the Vicar of Christ, still has enough weight in the wider world to make crowned heads and Resolute desks uneasy, and I think that’s a good thing.

Pope Leo XIV is asking not just his adherents, but people of faith and those of good will in general, to think about how our use of technology influences how we see other human individuals in all their humanity, a quality we share together, which we do not with chatbots or online assistants. Could our patterns of interaction with AI tools start to erode our sense of humanity when dealing with people?

His focus on the core aspects of humanity is appealing to me, no less than when he pushes my nerd button by quoting towards the end, about responsibility on our part, from J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s a passage where Gandalf is speaking about the hopes of humanity in a time of doubt and great challenge:

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

I might wish the pope had added just one more line to that quote, which went on: “What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

Pope Leo is asking us at least to think about the weather forecast before we make too many plans. I have a few more thoughts about this encyclical before I’m ready to move on with July’s celebrations.



Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s happy to read an encyclical from time to time. Tell him how you feel about AI at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 5-29-2026

Faith Works 5-29-2026
Jeff Gill

Pluralism versus hegemony in a semi-quincentennial year
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You may well be tired of America 250 observances, but I most assuredly am not.

This is in part because your humble scribe is a history geek, first class. It’s just how I roll. If you find this 250th year of American independence to have far too much history content in it, consider it like soluble fiber in your diet. You almost certainly can use more, even if you think you don’t like it. Me, I consume history for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a second breakfast just for good measure (ask Merry and Pippin to explain).

Church history is catnip for me, but the pastor in me is quick to say: you don’t have to have a passion for history to have a deep and meaningful faith. Your religious beliefs are not dependent on knowing the whole history of how the wider community of faith has developed some of the words and practices we associate with the practice of a personal faith.

I think it might help develop deeper roots to that growing faith, but again, it’s not necessary. Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and Aquinas all have something to tell us, in agreement or opposition, about how faith writ large works itself out across time, but your faith in divine providence and future hopes doesn’t require you be able to write a short biography of all four.

Where this gets sticky is in good citizenship, especially in a pluralist democracy like these United States.

If you believe your faith in where we came from, and where we are going, is correct and worth basing your own life choices on today, you might well believe that we’d all be better off if everyone were instructed to believe in much the same way. If there are lots of people whose faith works very differently in our civil discourse, that might make our coming together to make decisions for the common good more difficult. Why not have a state church, an official faith, a standard of belief which all elected officials and responsible authorities must agree to? It’s not too odd at all to think so.

John Locke, though, saw in the 1600s that the idea of a state church and civil religion that had total authority over public life, a sort of hegemony around church and state, did not actually work out in practice the way you might hope. The persistence of what that era called “non-conformists,” or people not part of the established church, in asking admittance to the norms and forms of public life (going to college, holding civic offices, even being a commissioned officer in the military), gave rise to a great deal of turmoil and kept tensions high between, in Locke’s day, Protestant Anglicans and Catholics in particular, and in opposition to other Protestants in general.

So Locke looked to a core set of values in good government that did not presume a hegemony for any one religious tradition, but to something like the basic human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as what binds a community together… and within that agreement, the freedom to assemble and worship as we choose. That’s pluralism as Locke envisioned it, living under the authority of a state church which was showing some strain even in the late 1600s.

A century later, Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton among others could try to work out pluralism in actual practice. It opens up the possibility of tensions, no doubt, but Locke’s experience can remind us today that the cure of uniformity might be worse than the supposed disease of plural points of view.

Me, I’d love for everyone to agree with me. But it wouldn’t actually work unless you had the chance to make that decision for yourself. Evangelism is up to church communities themselves to make the case for their beliefs, not the government.

And history does show us that’s the better way.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s got a bit more to say yet about America 250 as it relates to faith and church life. Tell him how you’re marking the occasion at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-28-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 5-28-2026
Jeff Gill

Taking a tour around Granville’s architecture
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There’s a tour I’d love to offer around Granville, just as I do walking and driving tours of the Newark Earthworks and the surrounding landscape. It goes something like this:

It would start with what’s called the “Nash cabin,” named for a family which actually was the second occupant of the cabin John Jones built for his wife and three children of blue ash logs in 1801. Abandoned after Lillie Jones died there in 1802 having their fourth child, it was again empty when the Granville Land Company settlers arrived in November of 1805, just before the final push into the platted area where their settlement would become our village the next day. Some slept inside, more in their wagons circled up in a meadow now half Erinwood and half the Munson Springs parcel, all opposite the Cherry Valley Road intersection.

It’s where Newark-Granville Road sees Cherry Valley Road coming up from the south where the 1810 House would be my next stop, opposite today’s Fackler’s Garden Center, one of the early products of the Munson sawmill on Raccoon Creek, a solid timber frame structure around a mighty single chimney in the center with five fireplaces. A home and a tavern and later an antique store, a notable location in both county and village history.

That original plat was centered off a stake atop the high conical mound at the center of the intersection of Broadway and Main Street, from which the original village street grid was laid out. Around the central traffic circle were the four corners of the “commons” which now hold church buildings, still owned in common by the village, though. Which is why from that twelve to fourteen foot high mound, I’d point you southeast, to the Opera House.

Built in 1849, this Greek Revival structure was the original First Baptist Church on the southwest corner, echoing in its architecture the 1837 Episcopal Church of St. Luke’s to the east. In 1881, as they did much more casually in those muscular days, the whole building was jacked up and moved across the street, so today’s United Church of Granville could be built in 1883. As a multi-use public building, the Opera House served many civic and commercial purposes.

Before anyone points out it actually burned down in 1982, I’m going to take our tour back to the east, and up Granger Street, to the Frank Packard designed and award winning 1924 Granville High School. This noted central Ohio architect had already done work up on the Denison campus, and was designing the Granville Inn and Public Library as he completed this comprehensive school building. The village saw it completed for some $200,000 with a 500 seat auditorium, a chemistry laboratory, and room for everything from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and it became a model for Ohio school boards to visit as an ideal facility.

Time may not allow us to get up to the nearby Denison campus to see the 1878 Doane Library, a gothic brick four-bay cruciform structure of a vast single multi-level room, with cast iron spiral staircases in the corners, an evocative space at any time of day.

So. You’ve likely figured this out by now. All six structures described here are no more. The cabin, the mound, the former occupant of the park named after it, and so on: they’re gone. Fires, demolition, replacement, time. Each shaped our village in ways you can still trace today, but are entirely vanished from sight.

Perhaps leading us to appreciate what we still have…


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s actually leading a Granville tour of sorts in June, so stay tuned! Write him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 5-22-2026

Faith Works 5-22-2026
Jeff Gill

Ground level for the Overview Effect
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Astronauts know about “the overview effect.” Sometimes called the “orbital perspective,” it’s what happens to a person after being “up there.”

William Shatner struggled to communicate in 2021 the overwhelming experience of seeing the planet, our Earth, even in partial perspective from far above, with the horizons curving away all around from his viewpoint on a suborbital flight. As a man in his nineties, with a storied career depicting humanity in space and among the stars, he felt a powerful emotional impact from literally seeing our world from above.

The recent Artemis 3 crew had their own version of “the overview effect” as they circled the Moon, and saw the Earth both vanish behind another heavenly body, and then appear again, blue and while and green against the stark blacks and crystalline stars of outer space.

To “see the Earth as one thing” is an experience astronaut Victor Glover wishes we could all have. His April opportunity was something while in orbit he shared back with us, saying “I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special.”

He was saying that to you, to me, to all of us. And he went on:

“In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist (in) together.”

That’s the overview effect at work. And the common experience of John Glenn and William Shatner and Victor Glover is to want to communicate it to us in some form or another, so that we know as Glover concluded: "And that we got to get through this together.”

We have got to get through this together. I was thinking about that hope, that wish, that desire, as I watched Sister Monica Joan’s funeral. A fictional story, true, set in 1971 just after we’d first been to the Moon.

It was the series finale for “Call the Midwife,” which is a PBS show out of England that ran for fifteen years, itself set from the 1950s to 1971. Nonnatus House was not a spaceship, but a maternity facility run by nuns, which did often seem like a place very different from the lives most of us know. There’s a perspective to it, which is as alien to most of us in 2026 as circling the dark side of the Moon. Yet it intends to communicate to the viewer something of our common human experience.

I will never go into space. Nor will I travel in time (Einstein seems clear on this). What I get to do, every so often, is take a group of people around the Newark Earthworks to think about this same landscape, shaped and occupied by human beings, two thousand years ago, whose marks on the terrain in mounds and moats and faint hints of elevation hint at meaning and purpose for the indigenous people of the continent who built them.

Why go for a three mile walk on a Saturday to wander along streets and down alleyways searching for remnants of ancient wonders? Because of the connections we can feel across time, between viewpoints, and to know we all are just trying to get through this together. Those Native American builders were people like us, trying to get by, while seeking to understand.

Finding connections in that way can open up a perspective that is suborbital, but makes contact with the cosmos.

Yes, you’re invited: I’m leading one such tour on Saturday, May 23, at 9:00 am from the Great Circle Museum. Wear a sun hat, bring water which we all need in order to get by. It will take us to about 12:30 before splashdown.

I mean, until we get back to where we started. And see it, perhaps, anew?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s looking forward to a lovely walking tour on the 23rd. Tell him how you make connections at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 5-15-2026

Faith Works 5-15-2026
Jeff Gill

When sacred space is somewhere nearby
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Sacred space is usually thought of as a church, a place for gathering with intentions beyond the purely personal.

Sacred spaces can be very different in appearance, some with stained glass and ornamentation, others very simple in architecture, with a minimum of ornamentation. You may have pointed window frames calling back to the Gothic era, or just plain double-hung windows and plain glass looking out into nature.

We have our local elements of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, the Octagon and Great Circle units of the Newark Earthworks, places for gathering some two thousand years ago. No ceilings for the most part, but enclosures with designated entrances, and room for many to come inside.

St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church has high ceilings and expansive seating with a history back into the 1840s; More Life Church east of Newark is in a much adapted school building, revised to house a worship space and educational rooms. Small frame buildings dotted across the Licking County landscape, Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian and more, give shelter to a Sunday service, no matter how small; large non-denominational structures have been built in the last few decades, without windows to support audio-visual resources once rare in worship life, now much more common.

Sacred spaces can be very different; we all know this on some level or another. And for some, church buildings carry some anxiety, even some anger, from past experiences with established communities, and even a congregation different from the one you had issues with can push some buttons for you. That’s why a few point to natural spots, groves of trees, and yes, golf courses, and say “that’s my sacred space.” And I think it true that any place where you can find God’s presence made more immediate in your life can be a sacred space. Black Hand Gorge comes up often in this guide, and places like the Japanese Garden at The Dawes Arboretum, too.

Sacred spaces sometimes come to an end. My home church, the sanctuary where I was baptized, had to be demolished; my ordination was under a tent next door to it before that final step came. There’s a parking lot there now. (Cue Joni Mitchell.)

Other sacred spaces get repurposed; I could do a chapel tour at Denison of all the places and spaces the original Baptist institution used before Swasey Chapel was built a century ago. The oldest church building in the county houses the United Way today; in between it was a muffler shop, a Hudson dealership, a bank office. All along, the 1834 tower shows the original purpose, sticking up in the midst of all the change.

Then there’s Ross’ Granville Market. It is no more. Lucky's Market will open there May 22nd, and I wish the new owners well. You might say there’s really no change here, still a grocery store, and not a sacred space. But I would disagree. Not only is there planned a major internal renovation, but it marks the end of an era. It feels like a church closing, even as a new congregation has bought the building and most of the furnishings.

Ross’ Market has been a place I’ve been familiar with through a couple of renovations even under the same management. The Ross family, which will justly be the grand marshals of the Fourth of July parade in Granville, has been a familiar and welcoming presence as long as many of us can recall; I could ask Greg about an item and see it on the shelves the next week, and that happened many times.

But it’s the “liminal space” aspect of Ross Market that I will be watching in that same building, to see how it returns. And it will. A place between home, and elsewhere, a spot where you might intend to meet people, but more often you met people you weren’t expecting. And conversations I had in the produce department have ended up being repeated in memorial services.

Sacred space, indeed.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes to go shopping for produce. Tell him where your sacred spaces are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-14-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 5-14-2026
Jeff Gill

And the beat goes on…
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Summer is here.

You may want to call this spring still, but once the dogwood blossoms drop, it’s summer in my book.

There’s a pattern to summers here in Our Fayre Village: Denison commencement this Saturday, Granville High School graduation on Sunday the 24th. Then Monday the 25th, Memorial Day, with the parade down Broadway to Pearl and ending in Maple Grove, ceremonies ending at noon, and the half-staff flag raised back to full.

Ecumenical Vacation Bible School starts around the four corners June 1st through the 5th, then Cub Scouts and others have their day camps and overnight weeks, church camps and 4-H, all through the summer but increasingly jammed in before August when school sports and marching bands begin…

All of this punctuated by the legendary Granville Fourth of July Street Fair from July 1 to the Glorious 4th (sponsored and managed by your friendly neighborhood Granville Kiwanis club), fireworks on July 2nd and of course our beloved Mile Long Parade on the 4th. Yes, I plan to bring up the rear as usual, but make sure to cheer hometown heroes the Ross family, our grand marshals this year. They have earned this honor!

Take a deep breath, enjoy the heart of the summer, where we’ll hear so much about America 250 both before and after July 4, 2026; did I mention I’m helping with some events in June around our national semi-quincentennial? I’ll save that for my next column. But then the Great Granville Picnic comes along on August 15, 2026, intended to help accentuate the 250th birthday of our country; the table space is entirely sold out along Broadway, but there will fun to be had aplenty, walking around from 4 pm to 8:30 pm or later… Granville schools start on Wednesday the 19th, so better start working on those bedtimes, parents.

All of that and I haven’t even mentioned the Granville Recreation District’s concert series, celebrating 50 years of music and community, mostly at the Bryn Du Mansion, but during the picnic back to the old home on the Denison Fine Arts Quad along Broadway. The whole series runs from the evening of Memorial Day to the evening of Labor Day, Sept. 7, at which time summer is officially done.

It can wear you out just reading about it, you know? Mark events in your calendar, because it is amazing how quickly it goes by. And I can assure you that people are already working on planning for events this fall and through the Christmas season, because that's how planning works. The reason I can tell you about all these summertime events in Granville is a mix of firmly established tradition, and the reality that people have had meetings, shared text messages, and forwarded emails for many weeks and months before this May, just to see to it you can’t get bored this summer. Youth baseball is already in full flourish, and soccer coaches are starting to mend their goal nets and pump up the practice balls.

So when there’s a clear evening, and as the sun is setting, look to the southeast in a clear patch of sky, see Scorpius with red Antares rising, with a crescent Moon pulling together Venus and Jupiter in the west. Just enjoy the stars and the sky, and take a few deep breaths. It’s going to be a wonderful summer.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; yep, he’s thinking ahead to Advent and Christmas these days. Tell him how far you plan ahead at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 5-8-2026

Faith Works 5-8-2026
Jeff Gill

Understanding your own faith, and others
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This Saturday, May 9th, there are some worthwhile opportunities in downtown Newark to learn from.

Newark Homeless Outreach is on courthouse square at 10 am with a memory walk, and their “Steps of Change” display of empty shoes, representing the invisible homeless around us. The walk is meant as a fundraiser, and you can find them online or social media whether you go on the walk or not. They will be feeding the hungry at noon a few blocks east as they do every Saturday, rain or shine, summer or winter, all year ‘round.

From 11 am to 8 pm a block and a half south of the courthouse, at the Canal Market District, there’s a Food Truck Festival, hosted by the Licking County Coalition for Housing. Some thirty trucks with food for every taste will be set up, and this, too, is a fundraiser, along with some information displays for their work all through the year, entering their thirty-fifth year in 2026.

Housing and homelessness weave through the Christian Bible, and in other sacred texts. Faith is a perspective that knows a tangible home is often elusive, and the solidity of feeling at home in the world is what people hunger for. How to find such a place while being a pilgrim people: that’s a tie that binds us all in faith, and in service.

Many different religious perspectives find helping and serving people who are for a season without housing a central tenet. My own tradition’s gospel according to Matthew includes Jesus saying “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” That same book, in the 25th chapter, talks about how serving the hungry and dispossessed is the same as serving Jesus himself. That’s created a deep history of ministry in those areas.

There’s a pillar, as it’s called, of Islam called the practice of “Zakat,” sharing from your income with those in need. In Judaism, “Tzedakah” is part of how faithful believers participate in the “repair of the world,” or “tikkun olam.” This work of justice is not just an ethical suggestion, but usually called a “Mitzvah,” or a “commandment.”

When I have worked with youth groups, I’ve found going to experience different Christian traditions, and having interfaith religious experiences as well, have been crucial in helping them (and their parents) understand their own practices. You see your own church more clearly when you come back from viewing things differently. Service experiences often do double duty in helping people develop their faith through actual practice, directly helping others, but in so doing usually encounter perspectives other than their own.

It’s also Mother’s Day weekend, speaking of common, shared experiences of humanity. My mother was always very supportive of ecumenical and interfaith experiences, sometimes when other parents were not so excited (or so I would learn later). To be blunt, her mother had some major issues with different faiths; then Mom went to college, and had both Catholic and Orthodox roommates. What she gained from those experiences, she wanted her kids to have, too.

This is also why, almost every year, I try to put in a column an exhortation leading into the summer inviting readers to visit worship services while on vacation, and even better, of traditions different than their own. Although, even if you just visit a church “like” your own, I guarantee you’ll see things differently there.

And if you do, I hope you’ll write and tell me what you learned from the experience. Even if it’s just “I’m glad to get home and worship the way we do here!” But I bet it will be a bit more than that.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s looking forward to some time on the road this summer. Tell him about your worship along the way at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 5-1-2026

Faith Works 5-1-2026
Jeff Gill

Religious literacy in the wider culture, and in church
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Can we all agree that literacy is a good thing?

And that is an expansive use I’m intending for the term “literacy.” That extends from reading as a basic skill to awareness of basic concepts and stories and characters in a social setting. Literacy can be up for grabs in other fields: mathematics talks about “innumeracy” as their parallel, but most people just talk about basic math as well as financial literacy, and we know what they mean.

Where we may not agree: our culture is slowly but steadily moving backwards from literacy on a number of fronts. And again, I’m talking about the wider application of the term. You can read simple texts and be non-literate in the way I’m thinking about. People can scroll on their devices for hours, and mostly be reading as they go, reading headers or captions or prompts, but are they developing literacy?

Obviously, if you don’t engage with a field at all, you won’t know its terms or usages. I’m not literate in many sports, each of which have technical reference points a player or fan of the particular game will know without thinking about. In my youth, adults expressed sheer bafflement at the lexicon of soccer, while Chicago area folk mostly could explain icing in hockey to a child (“it ain’t on a cupcake, okay?”) and discussed why Stan Mikita wore a helmet while most NFL players then did not.

Religion has its own set of terms, and even related branches of Protestantism might have a vocabulary different from that of their cousins in faith. How you talk about salvation, redemption, stewardship, atonement (just to name a few) requires a certain level of religious literacy than you have to pick up if you’re new to that church.

Even individual congregations have a form of local literacy. Many churches I’ve served have main doors, sometimes even painted read, that almost no one used. Once you got involved, you learn where people park, and how they enter the building, let alone the fraught subject of: where can I sit? Literacy, familiarity, knowing the landscape.

Some folks in evangelism and seeker-sensitive outreach programs have suggested Christians should drop, or at least avoid in most public settings, the narrow technical terms which aren’t familiar to everyday folk. To speak of “being saved” takes some explaining if you’ve never gone to church before, however you understand that working out. And internal language of the church building, like narthex, nave, chancel: church growth consultants say “don’t use those words.”

Or, we find ourselves more aware of needing to teach as we talk. That’s been my orientation on all this as a minister, and I say that not certain I’ve always been right in how I work these questions out. Be aware of what’s “insider speak” and interpret as you go. Religious leaders are always needing to be aware of how they are called to teach as much as just preach.

An intersection of literacies is the largely concluded debate, at least in many quarters, about hymnals. Quickly, I’ll concede: hymnals in hand make people face down, sing out less, and are awkward for some to manage.

My musically literate friends are quick to cry out: no! Hymnals give us simple technology for a wide range of songs, and allow for harmony in our singing, four parts and sometimes even a descant!

To which I sadly say: but was there ever a golden age of most people singing parts during worship? I say it sadly, as my mother taught me from youth what it was, and how to do it. She sang alto, I (once upon a time) sang a high tenor as I learned how to follow the music, and when grandma visited she sang soprano.

Today, many churches have no hymnals in the seating… or Bibles. He said, sadly.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s got a bit more to say about religious literacy, musical and otherwise. Tell him what you read in your faith development at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-30-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 4-30-2026
Jeff Gill

Revolutionary figures, pioneering personalities
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For all sorts of reasons, the nationwide America 250 observance is focused on Revolutionary War history. 250 years ago was 1776, and it’s our nation’s formal “birthday” of July 4 of that year which gives us the cause for celebration; that leads us pretty directly into the conflict with Great Britain, which started with shots fired on Concord Bridge in April of 1775 and did not end until the Surrender at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781.

Ohio has some investment in the Revolutionary War, if much less than the original Thirteen Colonies. Towards the end of the hostilities in 1780, George Rogers Clark fought the Battle of Piqua against Black Hoof and a contingent of Shawnee and other Native American tribal warriors, just west of Springfield.

Not long before, between 1778 and 1779 Fort Laurens was built and then abandoned, northeast of us towards Canton; the losses there are still marked by a "Tomb of the Unknown Patriot of the American Revolution.” Non-combatant Native Americans died in even larger numbers by the Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782, around a hundred women and children and old men buried in a mound still memorialized in that village today.

But Licking County between 1775 and 1783, when the official peace was signed in Paris, has little or no recorded history. What we have are dozens of Revolutionary War veterans who brought history with them after 1799, as they came and settled this formerly Shawnee and Wyandot and Delaware land.

Of the some 7,000 Revolutionary War veterans buried in Ohio, over 140 have been tracked and recorded here in Licking County. Doug Stout with the Licking County Library has been diligent in this work for many years, and the Sons of the American Revolution along with the Daughters of the American Revolution have been hard at work in recent times to ensure good, readable memorials at or near our veterans’ last resting places. Some are in outlying and less well tended cemeteries, and no small number are in well known burying grounds, like the Old Colony in Granville, with a new monument just erected to list them all, or in Newark’s Veterans Park on Sixth Street.

The three Revolutionary War narratives I associate most with Granville are Patrick Cunningham, Jonathan Benjamin, and William Gavit. They arrived here in roughly that order, Cunningham and Benjamin before the 1805 settlement of the village, and Gavit with those first Granville Land Company pioneers.

I’ve written previously about all three, and there’s a book in each of them. Cunningham, born in Ireland in 1750, served with Pennsylvania troops and by 1800 had outlived two wives, raised children to adulthood, and was an unusual solo pioneer. Cunningham would soon move to fast growing Newark, married again, finally dying and buried outside of Hebron in 1832.

Benjamin would live to 1841, just six weeks shy of his 103rd birthday, outliving almost his entire family and laid to rest in the Old Colony Burying Ground by his grandchildren. A young soldier in the French and Indian War, losing close family in the ongoing battles on the Pennsylvania frontier with British allied Native American raiding parties, he went on to serve as a sergeant in the Pennsylvania troops during the Revolution. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, both Cunningham and Benjamin are likely to have encountered Rev. David Jones during the war at Valley Forge, who directed many after the conflict ended to the valleys around the Licking River.

William Gavit was a young sailor engaged in naval action against the British during the latter years of the Revolution, and so was one of the last living veterans of the Revolution in our area, dying in 1854 at the age of 87. He was captured twice by the Royal Navy, and escaped twice from the infamous prison ship “Jersey,” where thousands died in captivity.

That may have something to do with why this seafaring youth from Rhode Island moves inland after war’s end, comes twenty years later to Ohio, and never seems to miss the sea.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes to wander cemeteries for education and enjoyment. Tell him where you get your history at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 4-24-2026

Faith Works 4-24-2026
Jeff Gill

If you’re reading this, you may be too close
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There’s a bumper sticker out there saying “If you can read this, you’re too close!”

That has to do with typeface size and traffic speed, but you get the point. If you’re close enough to make out the words, you probably should slow down, unless you’re standing right behind the vehicle in a parking lot.

If you are reading this column, whether on a screen or phone online, let alone in print, you may be “too close” to the question of literacy and religion. Preachers talk about Biblical literacy all the time, as do many church leaders, lay or ministerial, but the reality is our relationship to reading is different than that of most of our congregation, let alone to the wider culture.

Some of us, a fair number of people even in 2026 Ohio, like to read. We do it for fun; a healthy audience turned out this week in Newark to hear an author speak about books, and the process of writing.

And I know as a pastor there are people who read their Bibles regularly, faithfully, diligently.

I also know there are many who wrestle with the topic, and find it hard to maintain a regular, consistent pattern of devotional reading, over time or just day to day.

What I hear much less directly about, but am painfully aware of, is how many people do not read. I’m not talking about literacy per se, and I’m not even sure calling it functional illiteracy is fair, but the practice of reading as measured by a number of metrics is on the decline.

Reading for pleasure by adults has been widely reported to have dropped by half in my adult lifetime. That sounds terrible, and I won’t say it isn’t, but that’s actually a decline from around 30% to 15%. If you think about it, that means even in the halcyon days of the 1970s, 70% of adults did not read for pleasure. That’s what’s generally referred to as a majority.

A few years back, it was widely trumpeted in book circles that the number of adults who had read a book, one book, at least a single volume, in the previous year had dropped below half. This isn’t even asking if you enjoyed it, just “have you read a book this year?” Over half now say “nope.”

As a born and raised American Protestant, I’m used to a mindset in my faith community of thinking that Bible reading is well-nigh equal to belief in general. If you don’t read your Bible, your faith is heading for the rocks. Not reading the Bible is dangerously close to not believing in God. Directly and indirectly, that’s what I internalized. But the unfair part here is two-fold: one, I enjoy reading, and read fast, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m more religious or a better person, I just read more. Trust me, I know that’s true.

The other thing that seems off here: up until good old Johannes Gutenberg and circa 1450, reading in your own copy of the Holy Scriptures was simply not possible. Monks and priests had handwritten, illuminated copies of the Bible, and the wealthy had beautiful psalters and breviaries or a “Book of Hours” for their prayers, illustrated and artistically written out, but Jane and Joe Average had their ears. They heard the Bible read in worship, through the year in the lectionary, echoed in bells ringing to let farmers know in their fields what was being sung and said in the parish church, but their Bible was largely auditory. If you missed church, you didn’t hear or receive your Bible text for the week.

Now, we can skip public worship, and read in our paperback “The Way” or on our Bible app across phone screens to get divine content that way… or do we? How should we think about Bible reading, and relating it to worship, today?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes all manner of translations, which is a column all its own. Tell him how you read scripture at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 4-17-2026

Faith Works 4-17-2026
Jeff Gill

Authors, readers, and a culture of religious literacy
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How do we share the message of resurrection with others?

Some like George Whitefield and John Wesley two hundred years ago preach on street corners and out in the open; we had a good example of that on Courthouse Square last weekend, and that approach can reach new audiences.

Others are more focused on institution building, planting congregations and seeing them properly developed and led and housed, which is where figures like my own tradition’s Alexander Campbell, or Joseph Smith, Jr., or even one-time local resident Archbishop Lamy came in, building churches and temples and cathedrals. There’s a place for that kind of well-ordered religion.

And then with the rise of mass media there came a new model for extending good news to those who needed to hear it: Aimee Semple McPherson, before her Dwight Moody and after Billy Graham, all examples of ministries which used modern technology to reach new audiences.

I will confess to being a lower-key preacher in most ways, including a personal interest in how literature and history can be used to open people up to horizons beyond their own immediate circumstances. For instance, Jan Karon may have reached more people seeking the hope of the Gospel with her Mitford series of books than many on television, or even those preaching in arenas. Susan Howatch some years ago and Anthony Trollope further back have been authors who created a space where the claims of faith can be quietly considered; C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien famously have done so with their writings. Ellis Peters had a series with a medieval monk, Brother Cadfael, whose chronicles I love to commend, murder mysteries with a regular touch of redemption in their plots.

Most Sundays, I preach to a roomful of people, generally looking to the texts of the day in the discipline of the lectionary (like most of my disciplines, I follow it mostly, but not always), and the circumstances of the people where I’m asked to speak. I trust God’s word can speak through my foibles and failings, and over time in a particular place I am building up a body of work, in the ear and the mind more than on the page.

Then there are these columns; they aren’t sermons, not quite. Whether as many or more, or less, are reading than did so when I started over two decades ago is something only the circulation manager knows for sure, but now we measure more by clicks than copies sold. What I’m regularly reminded of, though, is that there’s a wide audience of you all out there.

Helen Vendler said back in 1980 (almost half a century ago!) to a convention of English professors: “Our students come to us… having read no works of literature in foreign languages and scarcely any works of literature in their own language. The very years, between twelve and eighteen, when they might be reading rapidly, uncritically, rangingly, happily, thoughtlessly, are somehow dissipated… It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to… Nothing is more lonely than to go through life uncompanioned by a sense that others have also gone through it, and have left a record of their experience.”

I think of this when people worry about the internet, and now AI, as obliviating the place of reading and literature in people’s lives. This is not a new concern, as this quote indicates. If we are “people of the Book” as many Christians would claim, what are we to do with the place of reading, let alone reflection, in our lives?

Perhaps part of the answer for preachers is in Professor Vendler’s claim: “It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to.” We as a church have not, either. It’s not enough to say the people will not learn: we need to teach them, which includes finding a way past the obstacles our times place in the way.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s not done with this train of thought, as you can probably tell. Tell him what you’re reading at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 4-10-2026

Faith Works 4-10-2026
Jeff Gill

What the bleep is the problem, [deleted]?
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Profanity is in the news, and if you don’t know why there’s no point in going there.

What the bleep, man? Why do certain words carry such weight of approval or disapproval?

For religious people, the roots of the question go back to a commandment. Yep, one of the big ten (not that Big Ten). Do not “take the name of God in vain.”

There is a whole deep religion rabbit hole we could go down with the Hebrew four-lettered or “tetragrammaton” symbol of the divine name, where it comes from, what it means, and how you work around using it even while knowing it. But the point is you are not supposed to say it out loud. It has to do with respect, appreciation, and a certain amount of mystery that is beyond us, acknowledged by a faithful avoidance.

Some carry this forward, by the way, to a caution with even the word, or name, “God” and they write it “G-d.” Obviously, I don’t follow that, but I respect the usage in communications as a seminary instructor; you’ll note that while I’m not Jewish, I haven’t and won’t type out the English version of the Hebrew name. It’s a weighty issue for some.

(Then there’s the whole modern, secularist insistence on always putting the name God in lower case, which sometimes gets done to a fault, a stylebook issue I may take up some other day.)

So all of this about being courteous about the name of God, just like you don’t run your mouth and use my mother’s name, right? If you say “Rose” you better be respectful… and not associate such usage with profanity, which is our general point. What is it?

George Carlin made some money, as well as paying out a bit of it, with his "seven words you can’t say” routine in the 1970s. He was eloquent in his own way about the role hypocrisy and inconsistency played in what is profane and what isn’t, and when.

But profanity is most often used for impact; they exist legally in a grey area next to “fighting words,” speech used to provoke. I should note during my brief sojourn in the Marine Corps, profanity was not forbidden to sergeant instructors, but God bless them, they didn’t need it. I heard less profanity in the Marines than I did in [insert almost any institution here]. Now, we heard about maggots, worms, babies, infants, pathetic hopeless cretins, ignorant basket cases, and worthless wastes of space, but very little cursing.

Good sergeants probably knew Mrs. Froberg. One of the great American middle school English teachers, she effectively made the point to her room full of hormone addled teenagers that profanity, in a word, was lazy. Profanity was the sign of a lazy mind. And friends? When Mrs. Froberg said the word “lazy”? It had the impact of a sergeant saying “maggot” at the top of his lungs. You could tell having a lazy mind was close to the lowest form of life imaginable.

Mrs. Froberg was right. (Carve that sentence in granite.) Profanity leaves you nowhere to go. Once you’ve cursed at someone, what do you say next? You can pile up Carlin’s whole list, and then what?

There is always a better way to express yourself, and with that insight, I would say as a minister the problem with profanity, however defined, is one of stewardship. It’s like gambling: you can’t really find a specific argument against it, Biblically, but it is a profound failure of good stewardship, of appreciation and best use of the blessings you’ve been given.

In the same way, swearing is inadequate stewardship of the gift of speech, of reason, of relationship. It’s a short cut that goes nowhere. You should avoid profanity, gosh darn it. It’s a small thing, except when it is not.

Mrs. Froberg says so.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has had many good teachers, of which Mrs. Froberg was one of the finest. Tell him about your memorable teachers at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 4-3-2026

Faith Works 4-3-2026
Jeff Gill

Jesus was dead on Good Friday
___


Jesus was dead.

As they took him down off the cross, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that day. He was dead.

For three hours he had been subjected to the harshest punishment the Roman Empire or almost any earthly authority could hand down. Crucifixion was not like a hanging or beheading, which while humiliating and fear inducing would be a moment in time once imposed. To be nailed to a cross was to be killed in as slow a fashion as human ingenuity could devise, to inflict as much pain as possible without quite killing the victim.

There are some traditions suggesting a member of the nobility might be executed by archers; Roman hierarchies had long had their own rules, from being flung off a height near the Forum (a spot tourists still visit), or other forms of regal dispatch. Crucifixion was largely for slaves, or criminals in occupied provinces like Judea or Galilee.

Your death would be a relief, but it would not come soon enough. Some of the crucified would survive for days, especially when Romans were making an example of a population, nailing dozens, even hundreds to roadside crosses after an uprising. During the childhood of Jesus one such display happened in Galilee. Everyone knew what crucifixion entailed.

With Passover at hand, and Roman feasts planned, the victims were considered lucky in a way: they would not hang on their crosses past sundown, after being nailed up at noon. The thieves with Jesus had their legs broken, a gratuitous infliction of a last indignity which meant along with the pain and shock they could not hold themselves up enough to breathe, past the fluid-filled lungs of the dying in that fashion.

All the traditions agree that when the soldiers came to Jesus, he was dead. To be certain, they drove a spear into his ribcage, piercing his heart. No doubt. Blood and water poured out, but the heart no longer beat. Jesus was dead.

Friends may have taken him down from the cross, but Roman soldiers supervised. If there was the faintest flicker of life in that scarred and savaged body, they would have seen it, and stepped in, short sword in hand. But they turned the corpse over to the Jewish leader who offered his assistance, in closing out this grim scene before day's end by offering up his nearby vacant tomb. Joseph of Arimathea and what others were able and willing, likely including Nicodemus, took him down, cleaned the body off, wrapped it up (the body now an it, not a him), and carried him the short distance.

It is said "Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James" and even other women, including his mother Mary, had seen where the burial happened, perhaps helped at some stage of the preparation of the body.

Some of them would come back, not because they expected to find him alive, but to finish the decency of what should be done to the dead body of someone you cared about, whom you loved. Not at once, but after things calmed down.

For now, Jesus was dead. They all knew it. It was now one of the few things they were certain of. Jesus had spoken of the kingdom of heaven, the realm of God, his Father's house, but the disciples and followers and friends of Jesus knew that was somewhere else, sometime yet to come. This day, Jesus was dead. As we would be. The goal now was simply to not make that dread day come too soon, as it had for Jesus.

The one they had come to know as the fulfillment of God's plan, of divine purpose on earth as it is in heaven, was dead. The future was dark, and empty of hope, even as the tomb was now filled. What else was there?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a bit more to say on Easter day, but this is not that, yet. Tell him why you have hope at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-9-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 4-9-2026
Jeff Gill

History continues to be made in Licking County
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As a church historian, I have noticed over the "internet era" a trend on local church websites that saddens me more than a bit.

In the late 1990s on early congregational websites, and on into the early 2000s, you would almost inevitably see a tab "Our History." This was common, even standard.

Today, you may or may not find such information. If there's an "About Us" tab you might find a short church history note in the drop-down menu, but just as likely you will not. Obviously, the growth of new non-denominational churches feeds this trend, since they just started a few years back — and there's a whole additional story there about how even denominationally supported new church starts will bury their affiliation deep in a website if it's there at all.

One reason given for this is market driven, if not seeker sensitive per se: people don't care. Years ago people moved to a town and looked for "their" church, regardless of other factors; today, it's more likely families are looking for programs and worship styles which meet their needs, regardless of affiliation or even theology. History is not a connection for many.

Obviously, I have a different take on this. I try to be cautious, because what I like is not to everyone's taste, and I'm told occasionally I am wrong about some things. But I think history is woven into our tastes and instincts and interests in ways that go beyond the trends of the moment.

2026 is in theory a great year for people like me. It's America 250, with a peak around the Fourth of July, marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence and our nation's founding, and many events have already taken place, with more to come even after July. In Granville, I'm doing a pair of programs in June I'll come back to next month about our history as a country and community around parks and the outdoors; in August, there's going to be a grand picnic event in Our Fayre Village. And on into the fall…

On the radio, some of you have heard me talking about a series of twenty-five historical figures in Licking County history. They range from the 1770s to the near-present, women and men, different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, some celebrities in their own right and others a surprise to even those who've lived here their whole lives.

The full list (in roughly chronological order): Rev. David Jones, Catherine Stadden, William Stanbery, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, William Hollister, Israel Dille, Jackson Shackleford, Thomas D. Jones, Johnny Clem, Gen. Charles Griffin, Edward Roye, Victoria Woodhull, William Woods, Mary Hartwell Catherwood, Reinhard Scheidler, Gertrude Dorsey Brown, Eli Hull, Augustus Heisey, Ellen Hayes, Bertie Burr Dawes, Jerrie Mock, Eleanor S. Weiant, Games Slayter, Dave Longaberger, Wayne Newton.

The challenge was to sum up a significant life in our county history in brief. They're one minute spots, but my part is forty seconds long for each. My hope is there's enough to make some of you want to go look up a bit more on your own.

Because all of these people tell us something about who we are. Not just who they were, but what we are trying to become as a nation, a county, a person in our own time. I would have loved to add a few dozen more, but these are a good start.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's a bit of a historian on a good day. Tell him which one intrigues you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 3-27-2026

Faith Works 3-27-2026
Jeff Gill

The question of a good death ahead of Good Friday
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If you were raised in the church, you don't find Good Friday too surprising.

That's simply the name long used in the Christian community for the day Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by Roman authorities in Jerusalem, some two thousand years ago.

Good, though? Good as in "holy," good because of the sacrifice Jesus as the Christ makes by accepting his death on the cross as necessary to our redemption from sin. Good because of our salvation in him.

To those new to religious observance, it can be jarring. Good Friday is crucifixion day? Really? And that's certainly understandable.

Good and death do not go together. Mostly. Basically. But if you have sat at the bedside of a long dying, there is a blessing, a relief, and yes there is a certain measure of guilt at times over the weight that relieved when death comes for someone long suffering. When only death is going to heal the situation, death can be, in a sense, good.

We are in the midst of an ongoing cultural discussion over how and when we can welcome death to the decision making. Sometimes, heroic measures, as the medical folk say, make no sense. Families are asked about "do not resuscitate" orders, or DNR markings on patient files. Harder are questions about feeding tubes, or other interventions. When do we stop pushing life, and when are we withdrawing it?

Recently, a number of deaths have been in the news, people I've not known personally, but whose lives keep intersecting with my own. Four men have stuck with me since their passings, in this order the last couple of weeks: Paul Ehrlich, Jürgen Habermas, Chuck Norris, Robert Mueller.

A scientist, a theologian, an actor, a lawyer. It would take longer than I have in a column to explain the personal ties, the likes and dislikes I might have had around their work, about these four very different public figures who died in a seven day period.

They were old men. They died, respectively, at 93, 96, 86, and 81. The last and youngest just a decade and a half older than I am, and what does that make me? The last two were known to have a faith they practiced, which is surely a comfort to their families, and I trust to them as their end approached. But I doubt any of them, or those they loved, called their last day "good."

Another "old man" who lived four hundred years ago didn't live as long as I am now. His name was John Donne, and he was a clergyman, a preacher, and a poet. Honorable callings, all. He is perhaps best known for a poem of which this is a part, from about 1630:

"Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee."

"Send not to know" refers to how the church bell was the internet of its day, in the Seventeenth Century. When the parish steeple rang out, you knew it meant certain times of day, but when it tolls, you learn the basic information that someone has died. You may well not know more, so you would have someone run into the village to find out: who died?

Rev. Donne said there's no need to ask. The church bell tolls, when the funerary tones ring out, for all of us. "It tolls for thee." We should not mourn more or less for ones we like more or less; each person's death diminishes all of us. Or as the Malian author Amadou Hampâté Bâ wrote not so many years ago in the Twentieth Century: "Whenever an elder dies, a library burns down."

May your Good Friday bring life, as we contemplate death. It comes for us all, but is not the end, and that is the goodness there is in it.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows everyone wants to get to Heaven, but nobody wants to die. Tell him what's good in your life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-26-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 3-26-2026
Jeff Gill

Mrs. Martin, in her manor house thinking back
___


Victoria Claflin, child of Homer, Ohio, and honored woman in Granville as Victoria C. Woodhull, led an epic life literally from coast to coast of the United States, and in her last half-century all over Great Britain.

Her nearly fifty years a wealthy woman in the English countryside are a lesser known aspect of her story; they do play a role in why one of her all too few memorials is a marker behind the high altar of Tewkesbury Abbey, honoring her as "Victoria Woodhull Martin" as she was known in that neighborhood, whose good works went into the fabric of the massive church and to preserve the green lawns around it.

The monument includes crossed U.S. and British flags, and it hints at why her resting place is not there; she gave her daughter Zula instructions to have her body cremated after her death in 1927, to be scattered in the Atlantic midway between the two nations.

Mrs. Martin was not titled, but in her thirty years of widowhood, she lived among and entertained those who were, in London and on her Norton Park estate near Tewkesbury. Her banker husband sent many notes as he traveled for work and health before his death ended a twenty-year marriage, and almost all of them, well into their respective fifties, were signed "Your loving boy."

What clouds this last phase of her life is the passion she had for "stirpiculture," better known as human eugenics. Mrs. Martin on her estate continued to write and publish to advance this idea, that human happiness could be ensured by controlling who had children. The through line for this belief of hers is the first marriage she entered into having just turned 15 years old, and her first child, Byron, whose disabilities we do not fully understand today, but who was cognitively a child all his life, even to his death at 77.

Victoria believed that the trauma of her marriage, and her confused and unhappy relations with her husband (who by all accounts was a terrible person), were why her child had disabilities. That belief was at the heart of her "free love" declarations, rooted in the idea that happy marital relations result in happy children, and vice versa. In an era when germ theory, anesthetic in childbirth, & surgical hygiene was still all controversial, we can excuse her mistaken beliefs.

The tragedy is that this error led her further into the mistaken belief that social control of who can marry whom, and how many children each should have - including sterilization of "the unfit" - would result in contentment for all. Her arguments for eugenics are profoundly discomforting to read.

In four columns, I've barely touched on the range and scope of Victoria Woodhull's work. She deserved to be remembered for more than mistakes or the mischaracterizations of others, but living as she did in the middle of vast social tumult, her story gets caught up in many narratives. I appreciate the work of people like Mary L. Shearer in Illinois, a descendant of Victoria's second husband (whom I've barely mentioned!) who has worked hard to clear up accounts of their life together, and locally Dr. Judith Dann, a scholar of Victoria Woodhull's life, has done excellent work in print, and at public presentations.

I hope you are intrigued enough to read a bit on your own about our "Notorious Victoria," and draw your own conclusions.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's read more books about Victoria Woodhull than he can account for. Tell him what you found interesting at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 3-20-2026

Faith Works 3-20-2026
Jeff Gill

Opening up the inbox, and taking a deep breath
___


As is so often the case, I have no one to blame but myself.

Most mornings, fairly early, I open my laptop, and toggle to the email. It is almost always a torrent, a literal steady flow down the page of new content, subscription account updates, solicitations to respond to opportunities to write about this or that.

Let's stipulate for starters that I have too many news and media sources. Given what I do here, that's no surprise (and no, I don't get free access to this paper, in print or online, that's on me). Newspapers, magazines, Substacks, online newsletters of various sorts, and while I get too many I did not ask for, it's not like the torrent would be manageable if it was just the ones I agreed to at first.

This is before I turn on the television set or open up an app on my phone, and decide which firehose of content I want to have pour out into my eyeballs. I'm just talking about my online and even email inputs.

How do I sort it out? I get asked about this fairly often, and I wish I had a better answer which I felt good about for myself, let alone to give others. There are a handful of benchmark pages and writers whom I would hasten to point out are not those I agree with — part of why I'm not going to provide a list here today — but whose perspectives seem to me to be helpful in getting a starting point in what's going on.

It won't surprise most of you to hear that's not from scanning the headlines, which I do look at on what I know many call "legacy media." That comes after a time sifting some religion content, usually tied to the Christian calendar (did you know we're in Lent? that we just passed Laetare Sunday, halfway to Easter?) as a healthy grounding. Saints days are not part of my Protestant tradition, but I like how they function as milestones, guideposts if you will, along the vast annual track we cycle through, month after month, season after season. Nothing says I can't mark saints' days, so I do.

Last week I spoke in defense of print Bibles; I support a general acknowledgment of the church calendar (without getting into peculiar debates over rules for the colors of pulpit coverings and such, which can be overdone). I'd also like to say we do well to keep our hand in with writing.

Yes, the guy who writes vast amounts of stuff on his computer keyboard, who has reached that point where he doesn't have to look at his hands to type, says we should write things down. Why? Because of the same factors that lead me to say a physical Bible is important, which have to do with memory.

And memory is not about passing tests or showing off knowledge. Your memories are in large part who you are. I've had some powerful reminders of this over the last six years. There is something powerful, and even useful, in forgetting (a subject to which I'll return), but we are also very much what we choose to remember, to hold onto, to focus on. What stories, or events, or values, do we choose to keep "front of mind"?

Online stuff is tied to (spoiler alert) algorithms and technology that helps to wipe our memories and upload new content on a regular basis. Like that firehose I confront on my computer screen most mornings. What you write down? That sticks in the brain, and somewhere deeper than neurons, I think. Notes and underlinings and scribbles in margins. Letters and journals, even. With pencil or pen, on cards or notebooks. The act of writing is a work of memory, which shapes who we are, who we become.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he carries two pens and a pocket of index cards everywhere. Tell him how you remember who you are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 3-13-2026

Faith Works 3-13-2026
Jeff Gill

What we remember is what we live
___


Does your faith community have a living word at work in your midst?

"The living word" is what the Danish theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig calls the communal text of what we have memorized. It may vary from congregation to congregation, but those shared corporate remembrances shape the life of the community.

Think of what you, and your fellow worshipers, have in your minds and hearts, whether there's a book nearby or not. John 3:16 will come up quickly for many; the Lord's Prayer is in multiple gospels (watch that ending, which is another subject), and there are actually two versions of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament.

Some communities put more emphasis on learning by heart than others; a few of us have committed Romans 6 & 8 to memory, or at least the last half of Romans 8. Quite a few of us know I Corinthians 13 from start to finish. How about Psalms? The 23rd, the 121st, old 150? My wife and I have most of Proverbs, chapter 31 (at least from verse 10) ready to recite, a long story for another day.

Actually, you might be pleasantly surprised once you start in on piecing together what you do have. Maybe not word perfect, but close. I don't have as good a memory as I might wish, but Isaiah 40 for funerals, and 53 for Easter, along with the whole story of Joseph in Genesis 37 to 50 in parts, if not the whole, live with me.

And who of us doesn't have at least a steady echo in our heads with Linus speaking from Luke, chapter 2, along with goodly chunks of Matthew 2? Plus Luke 24: 13-35 a fair number of us could assemble, if piecemeal, as a coherent story we carry.

I mention all of this to speak a word for holding onto a print Bible in your spiritual disciplines. As many of us are reading scripture a bit more regularly in Lent, preparing for Holy Week at the end of the month, there's something to be said for the physicality of a book in one's hands.

Bible apps? Helpful! The Bible on my phone? Got it! Resources? So, so many: I have a rich collection of Greek and Hebrew helps, but I pull up an interlinear reading on my laptop or phone all the time to piece together an exegesis of a term in the week's reading. Yes, you can read Holy Writ on screens and devices.

Yet it is indisputably true: physical books provide cues which anchor memory. Reading on screens tends to default to more of a "scanning" mode, with less retention in your long-term memory. The National Institutes of Health call this the "screen inferiority effect." Reading from a text with weight in your hands, the feel of pages as you turn them, seeing the marks on the page you've made in the past, all of this builds connections within your memory-making capacity in ways a well-lit screen cannot.

A stack of leather-bound unread Bibles gathering dust versus a Bible app you actually read: there's no question I support using any technology to keep you immersed in a living, vital Bible practice.

What I want to encourage, though, is having a version or two around in print, between covers, which you pick up, underline in, and read through. Because I'm with Grundtvig: the Bible you remember is the scripture you live out. And that's when God's Word "is living and active and full of power." (Hebrews 4:12)


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few Bibles at home, some of them in English. Tell him how you remember to read the Bible regularly at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-12-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 3-12-2026
Jeff Gill

Victoria Woodhull, apostle of free love (or was she?)
___


In 1876, Victoria Woodhull in one of her last public statements on marriage in the U.S., before moving to Great Britain in 1877 (where she would live until her death in 1927):

"I mean by marriage, in this connection, any forced or obligatory tie between the sexes, any legal intervention or constraint to prevent people from adjusting their love relations precisely as they do their religious affairs in this country, in complete personal freedom; changing and improving them from time to time, and according to circumstances."

Allowing for some Victorian turns of phrase here, that's not a controversial statement in 2026. Some scholars even see it, in 1876, as a retreat from her more controversial earlier speech of 1871, where before a packed house in New York City, in response to a shouted accusation from the crowd, she said "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere."

The latter statement, and the interpretation usually placed it, has defined Victoria Woodhull for generations. She's been called "the apostle of free love" and been adopted as a sort of mascot for all sorts of movements around sexual liberation. Her later comments modifying and limiting her intention are often dismissed as late in life prudery and a retreat from a former bold stance.

But I have come to believe that there is, for her time, an even bolder interpretation to put on her words in and just after 1871, which is in line with her later assertions against promiscuity, and in favor of marriage and commitment. It is present in her many recorded speeches from the late 1860s almost to the end of her life, though it has to be said that much of her rhetoric in the Twentieth Century leaned into the then-new eugenics movement. But her original theme is a bit disguised, again thanks to the euphemisms of her era which was indeed called "Victorian." To find it, let's look at some other eminent Victorians whose lives made me realize what our Victoria was trying to say.

Noted newspaper editor Horace Greeley ("Go west, young man") infamously had a tempestuous relationship with Mary Cheney, they were married in 1836: Wikipedia sums up by telling us their "marriage was not a happy one, and [that he] avoided his wife and their house. However, he kept her almost constantly pregnant." They had seven children and an unknown number of miscarriages. Not to be crude, but he could not have "avoided his wife" entirely, could he?

By way of comparison, in England the author Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, also in 1836; in the next fifteen years they would have ten children and at least two miscarriages. Though she was for that era a well-educated woman and an author herself, it was recorded that he said had "contempt" for her intellect, and called her housekeeping "incompetent." Yet there were at least a dozen pregnancies over fifteen years?

What I'm saying is that the skeleton key to Victoria Woodhull's social teaching was something even she could barely bring herself to say straight out: she was arguing a woman had the right to say no, even to her husband. And her audiences in general knew that was what she was saying. For this assertion, this right to say "no," she became known as "Notorious Victoria."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a fourth and final installment coming later this month. Tell him what you think about our Victoria at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 3-6-2026

Faith Works 3-6-2026
Jeff Gill

Faith and citizenship in America 250
___


When we look back to the years around 1776, which we mark this year with the America 250 celebrations marking the passage of the Declaration of Independence, distance can tend to flatten some of the differences which are more obvious in the historical record.

We are in the middle of another Middle East conflict in 2026, in opposition to a country with a state religion. But it's worth recalling that the United States isn't in opposition to Islam itself. From the Founders themselves, religious pluralism is part of our model for representative democracy, going back to John Locke, whose political philosophy was so influential on the Declaration.

Thomas Jefferson rephrased a passage from Locke's 1689 "Letter on Toleration" in his personal notebook around 1776, reminding himself that Locke: "…says neither Pagan nor Mahometan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion." The precedents Jefferson copied from Locke echo strongly in his Virginia "Statute for Religious Freedom," which says: "(O)ur civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions."

The statute, drafted in 1777, which became law in 1786, inspired the Constitution's "no religious test" clause, and was one of the influences on what would become the First Amendment in the 1789 "Bill of Rights" which the founders quickly added to the 1787 Constitution.

Jefferson wrote in an autobiographical fragment from 1821 about his intentions with the Virginia "Statute for Religious Freedom": "[my] intent had been "to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Muslim], the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

John Adams mentioned Muhammad favorably in his 1776 book "Thoughts on Government" as a "sober inquirer for truth" along with figures like Socrates and Confucius. He also signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797 as president, which states that our new nation had no "enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen [Muslims]."

George Washington's views are even more expansive, if with qualification. A 1784 letter to a business associate about prospective employees for Mount Vernon says: "If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, Jews, or Christian of any Sect—or they may be Athiests…"

Sadly, this is largely about the purchase of skilled tradespeople, more than the hiring of such staff. Washington, like Jefferson, was an enslaver on his properties. Later records with names of people enslaved at Mount Vernon include women's names like Fatima and Nila which strongly suggest Islamic connections, as does the Anglicized name "Sambo" from Sambou, a common name for a second son in Islamic parts of west Africa. Most scholars estimate at least 15% of enslaved Africans brought to the United States were Muslims, so the presence of that faith would have been general, if largely invisible to public records.

Yet Washington, after a visit to Newport, RI in 1790 wrote back to the Touro Synagogue and the anxious Hebrew congregation there these words: "the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." And in closing reassurance, he says "May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy."

"To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance" are words worth holding dear in the American 250th commemoration, as is Washington's love of Micah 4:4, which he cites some 50 times in his personal correspondence.

"But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he does not have a fig tree, but hopes a shady porch will do. Tell him how you are marking this America 250 year at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 2-27-2026

Faith Works 2-27-2026
Jeff Gill

Feeling part of a larger family in Licking County
___


60 years is a respectable run for almost any event, and I was caught by the reminder at The Dawes Arboretum of their Maple Syrup Day tradition.

Beman and Bertie Dawes began tapping maple trees in late winter of 1919 when they began what would become their family estate, Daweswood. Decades later, as The Dawes Arboretum, their son Beman Gates Dawes, Jr. would suggest to his fellow board members that they hold an old-fashioned "Maple Syrup Day" in February of 1966.

This caught my attention because my wife Joyce and I went out to Dawes in our first winter in Licking County, at the invitation of some active volunteers there who were active in our church at the time, as well as the legendary Al Cook, director of horticulture but also storyteller extraordinaire.

But in truth it was Marge and Jess Woolard, and Gerald Patton, who first told us we had to come out and learn about tapping trees for sap, as the days lengthened, the sun shone longer but nights still froze, all bringing up the sap from within the wood bearing the sweetness that would become, with great care and much effort, the maple syrup we all loved.

Our first must have been the 24th, and I dimly recall going back and helping for the 25th occasion of "Maple Syrup Day." Gerald loved to explain to kids about the passage of the sap in the tree, and through the spiles into the tube system they had started using instead of individual buckets, drawing multiple trees' worth of sap into barrels. The Woolards held court at the log cabin helping cook down the sap into syrup over an open fire in a vast iron kettle. The old evaporator used by the Dawes family was in a corner, no longer at work, but testimony along with a range of earthenware jugs of the mark left by Daweswood on the forest. Dawes maple syrup was a coveted gift: Beman and Bertie never sold any, and to be fair they had the Pure Oil Company to pay the bills. They just loved making maple syrup.

Today's Dawes Arboretum makes its own mark, teaching about trees, nature, and history. Part of that teaching is good stewardship, and part of that stewardship is… they don't tap arboretum trees for sap anymore. Well, just a few, gently, for teaching purposes. But tree tapping leaves scar tissue, and over time is not good for sugar maples, and an arboretum is about sustaining trees, not killing them.

But as I learned this, I also saw at this 60th anniversary old friends from Granville, Tom & Wendy Miller, whose maple sap was simmering on the fire in the familiar old kettle; syrup for tasting was from up by Utica. The Dawes family endeavor now covers the county.

And I will say that over thirty years ago after Joyce & I had been arboretum members & volunteers ourselves for a while, I wrote a piece for their newsletter about our new big backyard, 2000 acres worth. We lived in an apartment when we first came here, but Dawes gave us a piece of property we could get out into and explore and help manage. Later we'd be part of replanting the hedge lettering on the southern edge with new arborvitae spelling out "Dawes Arboretum."

Having met a few members of the Dawes family through the years, I know they stay connected to the former family homestead, and they've always made me feel welcome there. It's a working example of a faith concept common in Christian scripture, about "adoption." Becoming included in a family to which you were not born, but adopted into.

Families of faith, associations and organizations, all echo this idea. To be adopted, included, made welcome, in a place and as part of an effort that is ongoing. Including making maple syrup!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been adopted into a number of non-traditional families through the years. Tell him about how you've been adopted at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 2-26-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 2-26-2026
Jeff Gill

The triumphs and tragedies of Victoria Woodhull
___


Buckman and Roxanna Claflin are in the December 1853 property records of Licking County, buying and quickly selling the property on the north edge of Homer, along the North Fork, which they had long leased. Some historic accounts say they were in Mount Gilead by that year, or it could be an older daughter was living there (married to the Morrow County sheriff), and they were back and forth, ending up as residents there for certain by 1855.

We do know that in the fall of 1853 their 15 year old daughter Victoria, born here in Homer, was by that time married to 28 year old Dr. Canning Woodhull in Cuyahoga County, quickly moving from Cleveland to Chicago by the start of 1854. Things would not go well for them there, though they would have a son, Byron by the last day of the year; after sojourn across the country from New York State to California (which by the way was her middle name at birth), they would end up in New York City by April of 1861 where she would have their daughter, Zulu (later Zula), and at some point afterwards divorce back in Chicago.

This divorced and largely uneducated mother of two could easily have become just another story of the American west, struggling to get by during and after the Civil War. Instead, she will by 1870 have become one of the most remarkable characters in New York City, with her sister Tennessee the first women to hold seats on the New York Stock Exchange, publishers of a pioneering newspaper (first to publish in the US the English text of "The Communist Manifesto" among other things), leading suffragist to become the first woman to address a Congressional committee, the Judiciary Committee, on the record, and in 1872 a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

And the leading public speaker of her day, second only, perhaps, to Henry Ward Beecher, noted preacher across the East River in Brooklyn, whom Woodhull would accuse of adultery and worse days before the 1872 election. Her editorial would launch three years of hearings, testimony, lawsuits, and legal proceedings which would put Woodhull, not Beecher, in jail twice… and in a way lead to her departure for England in 1877, having divorced her second husband, Col. James Blood, the previous year.

Deeper scholars than I, including some in Granville under the auspices of the Robbins Hunter Museum, have tried to sort out the complicated records of the Claflin family, of which I've only located a few small parts on my own. But there is a through line in Victoria C. Woodhull's story I think worth re-telling, even if it takes a few installments to set the stage, a narrative which is all too relevant in 2026 as we watch hearings and testimony and legal proceedings play out over power, permission, sex and gender issues.

Why did Buck & Anna let their 14 year old daughter go out with, and soon after her 15th birthday marry, a man a decade and more older? The fact that he was a doctor (and he was by the standards of the era, if not a good one) doesn't justify it; if you think "well, in the 1850s?" you would be incorrect. Records before 1890 are notoriously spotty, but many historians have taken a shot at figuring out things like average age of first marriage for women & men, and in the 1850s it was around 19, edging up into the 1860s. 15 wasn't illegal, but it wasn't usual.

It is hard to read the fragmented narratives around Victoria's early life and not think money and security loomed large as rationales for this otherwise impossible situation, for her parents if not for her.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got two more installments planned, so here's hoping you're interested. Tell him if you are or are not at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.