Notes from my Knapsack 8-13-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 8-13-2026
Jeff Gill

What may yet develop in Licking County
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Are you familiar with the “Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647”?

The quaint and majestically named law was passed in Massachusetts, requiring any community with 50 households or more to open a public school and hire a schoolmaster. The Puritan culture of 1647, which admittedly was a year or two ago (as in over 350 of them), was one which valued literacy highly, because the reading of the Bible was central to the dominant faith.

Massachusetts was an early and ongoing center for encouraging the development of public education. It was a core cultural value. This was true even before 1805, when a wagon train set out from that region to establish Granville, Ohio that year.

Granville has been interested in public education since before it began. It’s a part of our community culture. And that’s where there’s a tension within the recent developments around developments.

The now withdrawn developer says they needed to build their houses in the Granville school district to be able to sell them at the stated price. They’re selling smaller homes in the $300,000s within Hebron, whose downtown is closer to the intersection of Canyon Road and Seminary Road than even Heath High School. The supposed $500,000 plus homes they wanted to build, which would bump to the $700,000s if they were larger and on bigger lots (hence fewer on the same acreage), had to be in Granville schools, not Heath or Lakewood nearby, both a stone’s throw away, closer in each case than to Granville’s core. Why?

Looking at the most recent Ohio Department of Education report card data, which is for the 2024-25 school year, the most obvious difference is size. The reported headcount for 2024 in Granville was 2,454, and it’s closer to 2,600 now, with the entire Heath district at 1,527 (lower now, we’re told), and adjoining Lakewood Schools at 1,598 (ditto).

That isn’t why developers are looking for access to acres within Granville’s boundaries, though. And I’d note there’s plenty of nice land right across Canyon Rd. which could become Heath housing, but there were great efforts attempted — and may yet again, by someone, in some way, to do the same thing differently — to get to the more awkwardly situated but unambiguously Granville schools property west of Canyon. So there’s a compelling reason, to a developer. What is it?

You might say graduation rate. That's a good guess, but on first blush, not so much. For 2024-35 Granville had a 98.7% grad rate; Heath a 92.3% rate, with Lakewood 95.1%. Yeah, different, but is it so much of a difference to explain the contortions everyone was doing to make a development work where they wanted it?

Look into other public data the districts reported, and you’ll see the key. Granville had 84% of their students go to college. Heath, 62%; Lakewood, 41%. That’s huge. And not in public data, but anecdotally, the community culture issue looms large in that even with the lower rate of enrollment, students from Heath and Lakewood look like they do not complete within six years at the same rate Granville students do.

That’s community culture. That is NOT to say everyone should go to college, not at all. But Granville’s community is oriented around that goal, and Heath is not in the same way. I know plenty of youth from Heath and Lakewood who went to college, to excellent universities, and succeeded, but I’m aware of the downside percentages. So are developers.

So are potential homebuyers.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s got a bit more to say about community culture and education. Tell him what you think about them at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 8-7-2026

Faith Works 8-7-2026
Jeff Gill

An odyssey through The Odyssey for Christians & Ohioans
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This is not a film review.

For one thing, I don't do film reviews. You’re welcome.

I do want to invite a conversation about “The Odyssey” because Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic epic after “Oppenheimer” is based on Homer’s over three thousand year old tale, and people interested in the Bible are in many ways naturally interested in ancient texts. Or should be!

Homer wrote in Greek, but the language of the Illiad and the Odyssey is known as Epic Greek, or unsurprisingly Homeric Greek, which is very different from the Koine Greek you learn in seminary to read the two thousand year old New Testament. The somewhat contemporary Old Testament of the Holy Bible of most Christians is in Hebrew and a bit of Aramaic (which filters into the background of the four New Testament gospels, long story), and Biblical Hebrew is to the Hebrew of today’s Israel what Homeric Greek is to Demotic Greek as spoken on the streets of Athens today, at the foot of the Acropolis… which was not even built until centuries after the Odyssey was composed.

And I say “composed” because the scholarly consensus is that the Homeric works were part of an oral tradition of bards and poets before they ever were written down. The oldest text of the Odyssey is, interestingly enough, in Manchester, England, and is dated to when the Athenian Acropolis was a century old, but centuries before the birth of Christ. There’s a number of questions of editorial transitions from the oral traditions to a “final” written form.

All of which puts in context that you can read “The Odyssey” (Homer’s, not Nolan’s) in a number of English translations. The first one I read is Murray’s 1919 version, and at least three others down to Emily Wilson’s 2017 edition. Each makes different choices about how hard to try and replicate the rhythm structure of the original Greek poetry, and how to translate unique words with key roles such as how Odysseus himself is described: is he complicated? Tricky? Many minded?

All of which shows how hard it is to take an ancient language and find a common expression for modern understanding which can be read by many to their mutual improvement. The Odyssey has been an anchor of a classical education for generations, in part because it helps teach the underpinnings of this challenge in ways that avoid the potentially more sectarian issues around Biblical translations.

What can startle, though, is when you get reminded of how the world of Homer’s Odyssey stands behind the world of scripture. In Book 10, describing an almost impossible challenge, the poet notes “but with the gods all things are possible.” Hello, Matthew 19:26, and also Ohio’s state motto since 1959. There are echoes.

Likewise, the running theme of Homer’s works is how the gods of the Greek pantheon are constantly interfering in human activities, but most often in the person of people one already knows. You are told in Nolan’s version that this is why “Zeus’s law” of hospitality exists, because you never know when you might be encountering one of the pantheon.

Which sounds suspiciously like Hebrews 13:2? "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

And again in Ohio terms, a reminder of how pervasive Homer’s poetry and mythology once was in education: the term in classical Greek for what’s called “Zeus’s law?” It’s a single word, one you know. Xenia. The entire code of hospitality and prudence in a world where divine presence could be anywhere, in anyone, is wrapped up in that one word: xenia.

Which early settlers in this state thought would be a nice name for a new town. It turns out there are odysseys all around us.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s impressed with the movie, but interested in the poetry. Tell him what inspires you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.