Faith Works 9-4-2026

Faith Works 9-4-2026
Jeff Gill

Work, for the night is coming
___


Labor Day weekend marks the end of summer in a conclusive sort of way. There’s a Monday holiday (for some of us) and the turn to September.

It is meant to honor workers, and work.

A Presbyterian pastor of the previous century wrote around the 1894 founding of the federal Labor Day:

Let me but do my work from day to day,
In field or forest, at the desk or loom,
In roaring market-place or tranquil room;
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray—
"This is my work; my blessing, not my doom; 
Of all who live, I am the one by whom
This work can best be done in the right way.”

Henry van Dyke invites us “in field or forest, at the desk or loom” to find an appreciation for the work that is ours to do. Indirectly, he admits this is easiest to do when we have a sense of ourselves in the work that we are doing, when “I am the one by whom this work can best be done in the right way.”

Which is harder when your work is a job. If it’s just an hourly wage, what pays the bill, you may be more interested in not getting fired than in excelling at what you do.

The preaching commonplace is to exhort people to do whatever they do with a sense of vocation, whether it’s sweeping floors or assembling widgets. And the hearer standard response is “easy for you to say, preacher.” Which is true. Most of us in ministry came to the vocation with a sense of calling, of being set and guided and anointed towards this work. That is a reward in its own right, and one not available to many in their workday jobs.

For me, the bigger question is one of vocation, how any of us can feel called to a particular sort of work. But I always think of my childhood scoutmaster, who had personal business cards, which said “Scouter by choice, steelworker by necessity.” Mr. E took great pride in doing his work at the steel mill with excellence, but it wasn’t his vocation. His vocation was leading young men in learning about nature, leadership, and their own capacity as adults. That was his calling, and his choice.

Labor Day I think is a social vocation of a sort, a calling to all of us to value the work which makes our lives possible. I’m in the middle of a transition with my mother and her care, and we’re saying good bye to a number of people who have cared for her in the last two years. Most of them have what are considered menial jobs, with mopping and emptying and lifting and carrying a big part of it. But there are people who find ways to offer the human touch, the kind heart, the personal presence even in the middle of getting the trash taken out or cleaning the room.

That’s a vocation in its own right.

There are the roadside workers I pass going back and forth along the interstates, orange vests and hard hats in blazing heat. Signs ask us to slow down and take care; every year I see ODOT sharing sad news of maintenance workers killed as drivers race to their next appointment, too fast and not noticing the people forced by their jobs to work steps away from traffic. A distance an inattentive driver can cover in a millisecond.

Our Labor Day calling is to be more aware of workers of all sorts around us, to be thankful for their labors, to show appreciation when and how we can, sometimes even just by slowing ourselves down, to take their lives into account.

Happy Labor Day, whether you get the day off, or not!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he often works Sundays. Tell him what you believe is your vocation at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 8-28-2026

Faith Works 8-28-2026
Jeff Gill

Church life and the “old folks,” whomever they may be
___


In 1902, the Fourth Street Church of Christ in Newark, Ohio announced they would hold “Old Folks’ Day” on Sunday, June 15th.

None of the articles leading up to this special worship occasion specify what would qualify one as a member of “the old folks.” There is an hint of Proverbs 16:31 with the note that this effort is intended to bless "these dear ones on whom rests 'the snow of many winters.’”

The penultimate announcement encourages “the old folks” by proclaiming “Front seats will be reserved for them. The sermon will be addressed especially to them. The songs will be the old ones they love.”

But the main emphasis is on access, and transportation, with a special committee formed to help those who “are unable to walk,” and requests for help in conveyance with an emphasis on such assistance being “round-trip, both to and from the service.”

Conveyances in 1902 would have been largely interurban cars, which would have required stepping up and holding on as they rolled along on their rails, or horse and buggy travel, which is also not exactly what we’d call “handicapped accessible” today. Henry Ford’s Model T was six years away, and we were over a decade before the assembly line would bring motor vehicles into the price range of more middle class families.

As for the ability to walk, I suspect they’re not talking about fully immobile people (who also had a much shorter lifespan due to pneumonia and other ailments which penicillin could fight, but not for another forty years). “Unable to walk” looks to mean more like “unable to climb stairs,” and 1902 had them everywhere.

The average downtown church had an elevated sanctuary, with a dozen or more steps up to the auditorium level, because they had no air conditioning, and did I mention all the horses? It was basic common sense for a public space to be elevated well above street level, if only for the dust (and much of that dust was powdered… material). If you wanted to open windows to ventilate, you didn’t want them to be at street level.

And it was just assumed in general that, in 1902, when you got old and started to have trouble getting around, you stayed home. (And died all the sooner of pneumonia, due to lack of physical activity.) There were some older people whose vigor was notable, and who still came to Sunday services, but they were exceptional.

Oh, and the average life expectancy in the first years after 1900? About 48 years of age. Now, child mortality means the average is pulled low, and there were not a few people who made it into their 50s and 60s, but fewer in total.

One of the biggest changes, in fact, of church life in the last century and a quarter is around the place and role of . . . old folks. In 1902, a special effort for a singular Sunday was needed to get a few dozen from their homes, often living with adult children, caring for them in their last years. In general, older people just didn’t come.

Today, after Social Security (first benefits in 1940) and Medicare (first benefits in 1966), along with hard work by unions and others to create a robust pension program for workers, whose life expectancy went from 48 to 68 by the time of Social Security, to 79 today (women average older, men a bit less), older members of churches not only attend, they give. In 1902, few if any lay leaders were retirement age; today, in many churches, most are.

Churches are still sorting out what it means to have a major influence in their leadership be the perspectives of those who are retired. Historically speaking, it’s not that long ago no one in leadership had that perspective. Is there a balance to be struck?

The fact that this column is set to run on what will be my 65th birthday is an entire coincidence, I’m sure!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s up to speed on Medicare, thank you very much. Tell him what you know about aging at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-27-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 8-27-2026
Jeff Gill

Education in modern American culture generally speaking
___


In the 1990s, I taught early American history at Fairmont State in West Virginia for five years.

I was an adjunct, initially replacing a sudden death among the faculty of a coach who liked to teach at 8 am three times a week or once a week for three hours on Wednesday evening. So my office hours were in the college cafeteria after the early ones or before my 6 pm to 9 pm offering.

Spoiler alert: I was younger then. And learned some things I did not know. Which was well over three out of four conversations I would have were not about course material, it was about how to stay in school when all their family was saying “you’ve had your year, or two.” The biggest factor? Grandmas who said “it’s time to come home.”

Were economics a part of it? Sure. But not all. I made friends with a state senator who told me about how much grief he got from his mother and four brothers over going to college. It was doable for him, but they just thought it was stupid.

This is why universities have emphases for “First Gen” students; sometimes faculty and staff who were first generation to college in their family will have a special sticker on their door, to let today’s “First Gen” know there’s someone who gets it. I’m third gen, but I married a first gen. She’s taught me a few things about that passage.

But I also recall going into a vast hall at Purdue my freshman year (as we still called it in 1978). The person who spoke first said “look at the person on your left, look at the person on your right: only one of the three of you are graduating within the next four years.” Truth be told, he almost sounded proud of it. Turns out the state legislature had passed some years before a very popular requirement that they admit anyone from the top half of their high school’s graduating class. Purdue’s response was “okay, we have to take them, but we don’t have to keep them.” Do the math: that dean was telling me they had a 33% retention rate. A third left during Christmas break or after one year. Today, that would not fly; then, it was accepted.

And as I’ve told here before, but I keep coming back to, my grandfather retired as a school superintendent in 1968. The town homecoming parade made him grand marshal, Mom and I riding along with him. He got a plaque which I still have, and in presenting it they noted among his achievements was that he consistently graduated 50% of his students from high school.

When I referred to that years later, Mom said “that can’t be right, everyone I went to school with graduated.” But I have all the yearbooks from his years as principal and superintendent, and through the 40s and 50s: first or second grades had 75 to 80 kids, eighth grade graduation saw about 50 names, and her class like those before and after her ran in the mid- to high-20s. He worked his tail off through the 60s to get his earlier 35% graduation rate up to 50%.

Today, we would not accept what my Grandfather Walton was honored for. Our cultural expectations have changed. Where are we now? I’ll say more next time.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s worked in and around public education for many years, including campaigning for school levies. Tell him about cultural changes you’ve seen at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.  

Faith Works 8-21-2026

Faith Works 8-21-2026
Jeff Gill

Classic literature and scripture meet current events
___


There’s still much to be said about “The Odyssey” as a literary classic.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, are a pair of Homeric narratives coming down to us from somewhere before 700 BC; they are stories of war. The Trojan War is a long siege and final destruction of a city variously known as Troas or Ilium, but ultimately people came to know the whole city-state simply as Troy. It was undefeated, until it was.

So the story of the conflict, across ten years, is the Iliad, and after the citadel of Ilus and city of Troas fall, the Odyssey is ten more years for Odysseus to make his way back home. If you saw “The Odyssey” the film does what many retellings do: it takes pieces out of both to make the story work for the current audience.

And this is where many of the complaints about Christopher Nolan’s version being “woke” I think miss the point. The Iliad and Odyssey have always been about going to war, and coming home. Each era has its own more immediate history around what it means for a community to send people off to war, how that affects those left behind, and what it means to return (and ask Agamemnon how that went).

We look at the impact and meaning of returning from searing experiences in our own particular way, using terms like PTSD and moral injury which did not exist a century ago, but these stories tell us how the lived experience was quite similar, whether you had bronze or aluminum, Greek fire or white phosphorus.

Written a few centuries later, the playwright Sophocles hearkens back to a Theban War, proposed as events centuries earlier than Troy. In his Theban Plays, a central character is Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, whose brothers die in a civil war. In the play that bears her name, the new ruler Creon decrees that those who fought him and died shall not be buried, on pain of death to any who do the corpses that honor. Antigone defies this command, casting earth on her beloved brother’s body, and will die herself… as will the ruler who set these cruel bonds.

Her story lives on in many forms, including a Twentieth Century opera, all tracing back to Sophocles writing in around 400 BC. In his time, he was trying to communicate, using history as his setting, something of the consequences that result from implacable hostility and lasting un-forgiveness. Sophocles wanted to tell a story about mercy and compassion by showing a world without them.

So it is fascinating to me as a Biblical preacher to look in Second Samuel, chapter 21, at events from around 1000 BC. It is the account of Saul’s concubine Rizpah, whose sons died in the tragic aftermath of the fall of the house of Saul, and the rise of David to the throne of Israel.

As executed lawbreakers, it was customary that after being hanged, the bodies would stay out in the open as a public warning. To bury them was a crime. We are told Rizpah on learning her two sons had been killed, went to their place of execution, “took sackcloth, and spread it on a rock for herself, from the beginning of harvest until rain fell on them from the heavens; she did not allow the birds of the air to come on the bodies by day, or the wild animals by night.”

On hearing of this mother’s act, King David is moved. He not only gives permission to Rizpah for the burial of her sons, he takes steps to see to the respectful committal of Saul and all of his sons and grandsons who had been killed in the recent past. Mercy begetting mercy.

Homer, Sophocles, Samuel: all ask us to put ourselves into these ancient stories, and learn lessons for how we should act today.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s interested in history, but you knew that. Tell him what parts of history intrigue you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 8-14-2026

Faith Works 8-14-2026
Jeff Gill

A trip to Kentucky, a look back to 1801
___


I came to Cane Ridge to commune with spirits.

The Cane Ridge Meetinghouse was built in 1791 by the local community out of blue ash logs, that wood so rot and termite resistant the two-story timber structure still stands.

It’s still wood, though, so in 1957 the caretakers reached out to churches of my religious tradition, with our roots to the Great Revival there in 1801, and collected enough to built a Bourbon County limestone structure over and around it, the Cane Ridge “shrine” of sorts.

My mother went with her parents in 1953 on their way to Mammoth Cave; when she got married in July of 1958, she took my dad to Cane Ridge for his first visit, and was shocked when they pulled in to see the old log church was gone. Word hadn’t gotten to her of the protective structure, but she often told me the story of how startled she was. I tell that story for her, now.

I last was at Cane Ridge with my father for a churchwide event in 1999; I went back in 2001 for the bicentennial events around the Great Revival, and camped on the grounds, sleeping in my backpacking tent. This time I stayed in a motel down the road.

Walking up to the shrine, and cemetery alongside where Barton Stone and much of his family is buried, I thought of my mother’s story, and my father’s, and the deeper stories of separation and loss alongside the gathering and celebration which made Cane Ridge a name in American history, a sort of Pentecost for this continent, and the returns we have made to seek the Holy Spirit at work, and the spirits of those who brought us here.

Sitting up in the balcony, which now has stairs (if steep and narrow), we are reminded of how people of color, free or currently enslaved, were separated up into that upper gallery, to which you gained access by climbing a ladder from outside. Some years later, as even that much closeness was a matter of concern, the ladders disappeared, and segregated churches were established.

On the way to Cane Ridge, another old church building of our tradition, but of brick, and built in 1857, spoke to a different sort of distinction: two front doors. The men’s entrance, and another for the women, and in those days seating was divided inside.

Barton Stone’s friend and colleague Alexander Campbell began to break this distinction down at Bethany, West Virginia, having a number of daughters and after long preaching tours, was unwilling to sit away from his wife and children. The Bethany Church had two doors and a divider in the center of the pews, but Campbell sat where he would in the 1840s & 1850s. It was only after the Civil War, and many men feeling like Campbell did, that the two door tradition ended.

Women’s places, racial division; today, our main distinction was a request for those physically able to go up the steps into the balcony, opening seats for the less able on the main floor. I was happy to surrender my front row seat to clamber up, and to commune with the spirits there.

When I came and sat with my father, we were in the balcony then, too. I sat where we had been. In the gallery, I talked to a woman I’ve known for years, a Black woman who said she wanted to sit up here, and think about ancestors. We agreed they were present.

A friend had the opening message, and began with prayer: she opened it by saying there are hundreds of us here today, but let’s double or triple our attendance, and invoke the spirits, our ancestors, by blood and by belief. We prayed, and after the “amen,” she asked: can you feel them present?

Indeed we did.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s still reflecting on that journey last week. Tell him where you feel close to ancestors at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-13-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 8-13-2026
Jeff Gill

What may yet develop in Licking County
___


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
___


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.

Faith Works 7-31-2026

Faith Works 7-31-2026
Jeff Gill

The password is death, he said cheerfully
___


If I just wanted to collect eyeballs and readership, talking about personal finance and elderly relatives would give me a completely different theme than the ones my editors expect me to follow.

Last week I was trying to cautiously explain how a power of attorney does not necessarily give you the right to request “transfer on death” status for bank accounts or other fiscal instruments. Some very specific POA’s do, but many, even most do not. Here we repeat the disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or certified financial advisor. Get professional advice for key decisions.

However: I can tell you that TOD is very helpful on the event of a person’s death, but a POA goes “poof” at the moment of death. Take a POA to a bank after someone dies, and if it doesn’t already say TOD for your involvement, there’s no power in that power of attorney. None. Count on it.

Also, count on this. You will die. Okay, now we’re back to the theological content you count on in my columns! The truest thing I can say is that you. Will. Die. It’s guaranteed. No one gets out of here alive, et cetera.

Jesus saves, but he doesn’t help you access someone else’s savings account; likewise, you may have faith you will see your loved ones in a time to come, but that faith isn’t a password (unless your password is “JesusSaves#1” which is not mine, so don’t try).

The second of the two items I have recently felt moved to share with you all, my faithful readers, is that not only is POA very different from TOD, but the relatively recent assumption that a “password notebook” will help you access a parent or spouse or Uncle Fester’s accounts is largely no longer what it once was.

Welcome to two-factor authentication, and the need to have not only the right password, but if you can’t use the Touch or Face ID settings, the ability to use the right phone number for texting or enter the email account from years ago all becomes a tragic necessity.

Because the grimmest thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks from my friends & colleagues dealing with all this is that a corpse’s finger cannot be used to trigger Touch ID. A deceased person’s face is different in key ways so that Face ID isn’t going to go “ding.” Yes, I've talked to multiple people who have tried. I can only imagine the doubled pain of having to go in to a funeral home before calling, stand at the casket, and try to… yikes.

Jake Tapper had an interview on TV recently with former US Senator Ben Sasse. Ben is dying. He has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which is responding to treatment, but that’s giving him time with wife and kids, it will not save him. The cancer is everywhere. As Ben says in this and other podcasts and interviews he’s given since his December diagnosis: “We are all on the clock.” Every last one of us.

Not tending to last matters like how someone who is not us is going to get into our personal accounts, subscriptions, and payment mechanisms after we die, is tantamount to pretending that we aren’t going to die. Or that it will come on our schedule. Ben Sasse is spending part of the precious time he has left on earth to tell people like you and me: “Redeem the time.” Think about what you are doing, and how those you love will have to get along without you.

If you died tomorrow — and you might, friend — how will what matters to you be cared for? How will your mortal expenditures stop, and what will your eternal investments reward? I thank Ben Sasse, a number of funeral directors, and not a few bank staffers, for the reminder that death changes things, irrevocably.

We can be ready, or we can pretend it won’t happen. But it will.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has no intention of dying any time soon, but who does? Tell him about timetables and Face ID at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-30-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 7-30-2026
Jeff Gill

Monetizing culture, eroding value, building houses
___


There is so much that’s wrong with the proposed housing subdivision in Union Township south of the Village of Granville.

Whoops, getting my facts straight is going to be a challenge. I mean, in the City of Heath, since they’ve annexed over far to their west. Once annexed by a municipality like Heath, it’s not “in the township” in the same way. Consult a lawyer for details.

South of the Village of Granville, but within what was established decades ago as within the Granville Exempted Village School District (GEVSD), which is a different legal entity entirely. Lots of the wrong things that get said in online discussion and even in person trace back to the understandable confusion about how “Granville” is both a village and a school district, but they are not the same thing. Not for taxation purposes, not for zoning, not for any number of things. Hold that thought, but hold it as two different entities.

Many useful critiques have been made, though, and there’s a website in opposition to the development which has smart people saying all the right things, along with some excellent media coverage, at least of the meetings that are open to the public, a debate I’m not getting into.

What I’d like to point out, and this will continue in my next column, are some things I don’t see or hear touched on as much, but bother me.

Top of the list: this “gift” of land for a school in the middle of the development. I will continue to call it a “gift” because gift it ain’t. You know the phrase “heads I win, tails you lose”? The developers are offering the gift of acreage right smack in the middle of the proposed 500-some house project. Handy, eh?

But mark well: the Granville school district is under a high calibre gun with that tract. They have to start the process of building this school fairly quickly, or once the developers have sold about 60% of the potential total of homes, a clock starts, and GEVSD has a year to launch building or the land goes back to the developer AND they can build out another 20% or so on that very land.

Think it through. The “gift” says GEVSD either builds a school to help the developer sell the back half of the development, which it most certainly would do, or else they get to hold the potential of even more students piled onto their headcount. If the school board and voters say “hey, let’s be prudent and see how this goes” they could either be pushed into a rushed deal, or get a harder hit in student count steepness. If they go ahead and build the school as the development starts, they’re literally helping fill it by doing so.

Heads they win, tails we lose.

So it’s not a “gift,” it’s a co-optation of school demographics to get Granville schools to help them sell houses by constructing a southern elementary school. Neat trick, huh?

My next column will involve numbers and percentages. And through them, a glimpse of something about “culture.” How do we look at our schools, and why? But as a down payment, let me note this: GEVSD last year had 2,454 students, while Heath City Schools had 1,527, and Lakewood Local just to the south 1,598. Granville’s student count is increasing, but the latter two neighbor districts have been shrinking. Why the rush to put students into the district already stretched thin?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s not normally big on math, but it tells a story. Share your views with him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 7-24-2026

Faith Works 7-24-2026
Jeff Gill

Planning for mortality, as we must
___


There are troubles common to us all. I Corinthians 10:13 is instructive in this regard.

One of them has to do with aging family members, banks, and legal documents.

Let me say clearly right up top: I am a minister of the Gospel. I am not a lawyer, accountant, or financial adviser. You can find them out there as you have need. Clear so far?

I may not be a lawyer, but I know there are legal complications about aging and debility and dementia I have had to become familiar with over the last couple of decades. In church life as a pastor, as a grand-nephew and grandchild and son or son-in-law, I’ve gotten to know a great deal in practice about, say, how and when you have to renew a driver's license, which is a subject I haven’t written about for a while.

And I had no intention this July in the current sequence of columns to write about powers of attorney and bank accounts, but I posted something on my social media last week to which I’m still getting reactions and responses. This is beyond even the feedback I got when I wrote about shredded chicken sandwiches (if you weren't there, don’t worry about it).

First and key item I have no hesitation about telling you all: a power of attorney in your hands for another person effectively goes “poof” when that person dies. Your ability to manage or control business affairs changes drastically upon the death of a person for whom you may have a power of attorney. You can take that to the bank, as it were.

Which is where this gets sticky. If you go to a bank to do something with the accounts of a person for whom you have a power of attorney (or POA for short), you will learn that alone gives you now absolutely no authority at all. Post-mortem, you’re in the hands of probate, an executor, and so on (which varies by state, so Ohio law may not apply in another state the same way).

Folks are sometimes shocked to learn this, and thought they had what’s known as “transfer on death” or TOD status. This is where my counsel is limited, but know this, friends: not every POA allows you to get TOD on a bank account even while the individual you’re concerned about is living, and they are not equivalent when they die.

In fact, you may not have a POA, but a TOD works to allow you access to funds and to make transfers. Details here I leave to the professionals. But if you are thinking ahead, have a POA for someone ailing or declining, and that POA doesn't specifically allow you to assign beneficiaries (and many do not), you can’t get a TOD applied to an account without that person’s involvement and signature.

My father-in-law gave his daughter a great gift: she came to visit once, early in our having to step in and take care of shopping and cleaning and errands while he still lived independently (and drove, but I said licenses are a later tale for us to consider). He had gone to each of his banks, multiple because like a good Depression child, he believed in multiple banks. But at each he had done the TOD paperwork, and all she had to do was sign and take them around to the respective branches.

That’s the ideal situation. But if you have an aging loved one who trusts you with a medical power of attorney, maybe even a further limited POA, yet the accounts are all in their names only, if you want to simplify how those accounts are handled, you are likely to need their willing participation.

What I’ve learned is that as a person goes into cognitive decline, still relatively functional but with large gaps in thinking or recall, that last step may be hard to impossible.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s been through a bunch of this stuff and hopes to be of service to those just starting. Tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 7-17-2026

Faith Works 7-17-2026
Jeff Gill


How would you like to be remembered?
___


One of the more unsavory aspects of our current and ongoing social media world is how it responds to the death of significant public figures.

The old Latin tag “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” literally translates “of the dead, nothing but good” and has been elided today into “do not speak ill of the dead.” Anyhow, as I said, that’s old. And Latin. It ain’t the internet. Trust me on that, if you are a print reader here only. Speaking ill of the dead is what it does “best.”

Now, if you are very online, you might be wise enough to check some of the accounts retorting the most harshly to anyone having the nerve to speak well of someone recently deceased. In brief, there are a LOT of bots out there. Accounts that don’t seem to have actual human beings behind them, with thirty followers and following three, but a string of posts and images, mostly of the most paranoid or hostile or both sorts of responses. Robot accounts, or bots.

There are famous figures who when they die are just going to get criticism. Nixon comes to mind, and Kissinger. Sure, it’s part of being in the arena, and both had public decisions worth critically reviewing.

But Nixon died in 1994, when the internet wasn’t even a thing to more than a very few of us. Kissinger carried on into a new century, and passed away in 2023 at the age of 100. And his death brought the bots out in force, not to mention the many a bit younger than him who were old enough to remember some of his foreign policy initiatives. Now, there was a bunch of what was said about him that had me thinking people confused Kissinger and Robert McNamara, who died in 2009 so before the more general social media environment had really gotten going. In any case, if someone said anything even slightly positive about Henry, they got a torrent of angry responses.

Today, it’s pretty ugly. Uglier. Public figures dying just get slagged online, and I think the social media surge influences some of the older school media accounts. Obituaries are more critical in print, on air, and commentary panels more pointed. You may say that’s an improvement, a step towards increasing truthfulness. It’s hard to tell, and I’m open to it.

What I do find instructive in the most recent tidal surges around a sudden death is how they show us what “being your own editor” looks like. Sen. Lindsey Graham is not someone I’ve met, nor is he a politician I’ve been a big fan of, but he’s certainly been a major figure in American political life for some thirty years. His turn against and back towards President Trump galvanized a great many viewers of his career, towards two opposite poles in most cases.

Yet if you know how to sift and sort your feeds, there’s a very interesting person coming across in the many personal stories and accounts following his death. Many state a sort of opposition to start, but then tell a human, compelling, usually amusing story. Somewhere in the middle of the humor and the hubris is a person. I feel like I know Lindsey Graham a bit better now than I did before he died, and I also realize how little I can know even about a very public figure.

In the last few months, I’ve done a few funerals; part of that process is talking to people about the deceased, in preparation for at least some of what you say about them. Occasionally you hear them from the dying person themselves, who knows you will be speaking of them after their passing. There are common threads that arise, and fragments of other aspects you learn not always known to all. Out of it, you assemble a eulogy.

Which can make any of us ask: how will you be remembered? What stories do you want told about you, while you still have life enough left to shape them? You are writing those stories right now by how you live, and leaving your mark on others.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s done a few hundred funerals and eulogies. Tell him what stories you’ve been glad to hear at gravesides at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-16-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 7-16-2026
Jeff Gill

We have not yet begun to… something!
___


We are done with America 250, right?

Wrong!

Huzzah, y’all. America 250 has the key date of July 4, 1776 to give us a semi-quincentennial this year, but is that the true birthdate of American exceptionalism? Of our united states working in union, equal justice under law?

You could make a case for Oct. 19, 1781 when we Americans won the battle of Yorktown; purists might look ahead to Sept. 3, 1783 and the signing of Treaty of Paris, which formally acknowledged that these United States are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.

It took us a while, with the Articles of Confederation and the Confederation Congress, but they didn’t work. We needed to write a proper Constitution of the United States of America, and we did.

U.S. Constitution was signed by delegates on September 17, 1787, and officially went into effect on June 21, 1788; The government began operating under this new framework on March 4, 1789.

So you could argue we have thirteen more years of America 250-ing to go, am I right, Todd Kleismit?

Seriously, the work of recovering our history and passing it along to coming generations is an ongoing work. I’ve found it interesting going into this summer to go back to previous celebrations of American independence, like the centennial year of 1876 which our county courthouse was a part of, shown so dramatically on all four faces. 1926 was our sesquicentennial year, and President Calvin Coolidge gave a speech in Philadelphia on July 5 which you can look up online quite easily. It’s much longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but both are eloquent descriptions of what the Declaration of Independence continues to mean.

Coolidge said “It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

As I said, it goes on a bit, but is worth your time to read in full. A presidential address that holds up a hundred years later.

And I’ve been reflecting as many my age have on the summer of 1976, the scenes and settings of the bicentennial. It was a summer on Scout camp staff for me, so no television, but the front page pictures of tall ships in New York harbor stand out in memory, brought up to camp the day after and read over for many days after.

America 250 is the latest version of how we look back, and use that perspective to plan a path forward. The work, and the party, continues…


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s ready to start planning the tricentennial! Tell him your bicentennial memories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 7-10-2026

Faith Works 7-10-2026
Jeff Gill

A pilgrim people, wandering in a familiar wilderness
___


In both Hebrews and First Peter you get imagery of the community of faith as a pilgrim people. Our home, our permanent place, is not here, but is being prepared for us, made perfect in Heaven.

None of which keeps us from getting pretty attached to here and now sometimes.

One of the lovely things in this life is how the entire Granville community comes together for the Fourth of July, with Granville Kiwanis in a leadership role for the four day Street Fair and parade on Independence Day itself. I had watched that parade for years, and have been directly involved in it since 2005.

With the calendar falling as it did this year, the Street Fair ended on the Fourth itself. One thing Granville Kiwanis prides itself on is closing down and cleaning up so the next morning, often being Sunday, you can hardly tell it was there. Even much of the pavement gets washed and scrubbed and rinsed, let alone the trash picked up.

After the parade in the morning, and with preaching duties early the next morning, I didn’t help this year with tear down. But I was thinking of them and their work as I drove past downtown on my way north as the sun was rising in the east.

Coming the other way, south from New Burg St., was a flotilla of trucks and trailers from the amusement company; the rides folded up and food vendors road ready. Travel trailers many of the carnival workers live in much of year, pick-up trucks, and the last few ride trailers passed me into the rear view mirror.

We were done, here in our village; they were moving on to the next town. They plan out their season, take the bookings that work out; they love coming to Licking County, and Granville Kiwanis works it out with the school district for them to park before set-up, and the night after tear-down. Six nights with us may be one of their longest stays in any one place all summer, and summer for them starts in May and continues into October.

The carnival is, by definition, a pilgrim people. They do not stay, they move on to where they’re next called to set up their booths and rides and attractions. Repetition makes master; they are quick, quicker even than our veteran Kiwanians at putting up tentage and assembling venues. Even faster tearing down.

We’re told they like it here, that we’re one of their very favorite stops. Maybe they say that to everyone, but I don’t think so. This is a good week in their books, about midway through the season, and they can tell by now how it’s likely to end. They like it here, but they cannot stay.

A pilgrim people we are. I’ve been blessed, in an odd way; my seminary church burned down not halfway through my training, and it’s an amazing experience for a young minister to work through with a congregation. Then my home church, where I intended to be ordained at, was condemned for structural damage and the service was under a giant tent obtained from the local National Guard, next to the church building which would be demolished a few weeks later. Reaffirmation twice over to me: we are a pilgrim people.

This world is not our home. This life is a period of engagement, like carnies in a town, where we come in to it with certain expectations, and leave at a certain time, even if not always known by us in advance.

The quiet dawn parade of the amusement crews headed south, as I drove north, to preach to another pilgrim people. The time frames a bit different, but the basic concept the same. We do our work where we are, and move on when it’s time, looking forward to what’s being prepared for us at the final stop.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s been known to clown around, but mostly to shovel at the end of the parade. Tell him how you travel through this world at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 7-3-2026

Faith Works 7-3-2026
Jeff Gill

A patriot lost, and found
___


Tomorrow is the day we’ve all been anticipating. July the Fourth, in this semi-quincentennial year, looking back from our America 250 celebrations to the 1776 origin of these United States.

Today, there is an event in Granville, two blocks away from the festive street fair, at the historic Old Colony Burying Ground. It’s called "Meet the Patriots."  The Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) have worked, with Tom Hankinson recruiting eleven members of local SAR chapters to re-enact some of the 23 Revolutionary veterans buried in that place. Five of them will "come to life,” along with their wives who are themselves members of three Daughters of the American Revolution chapters.

If you’re reading this Saturday morning, you have time: the event takes place from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m., with other activities and patriotic trinkets for children. They even have a rain date to Sunday, July 5 if necessary.

As they were planning, a question came up that got passed along to me. It was an inquiry about a Revolutionary War soldier, then a pioneer to Granville shortly after 1805, who died in 1844 and is one of the 23 being honored. His name was Stephen Mead.  As it was said to me: “The pickins are really scant for Stephen Mead!”

The Granville Historical Society could confirm that his wife was Dorothy Sacket, they married in Rutland, Vermont in 1780, and they had eight children, seemingly all there (which would fit the years and age of both). Beyond that, nothing.  His headstone in the Old Colony Burying Ground is of later government issue, with the military's scant details; he would have had a previous marker, but Charles Webster Bryant’s records didn't have any text for him, indicating that his stone must already have been missing by 1885.

Mead is, in a small scale, a big mystery. Bushnell’s history of Granville, rich with detail from the perspective of 1889, notes his widow’s death, but not Stephen’s. In the book, 1849 notes a number of Meads are among the score or more who head to California in search of gold that year, and at the end of the entry Bushnell lists the death of "Mrs. Dorothy S. Mead, June 23d, aged eighty-eight.”

The entry for 1844 doesn’t mention him at all. The necrology for that year states "There were twenty-five deaths this year; among them…” then goes on to describe five individuals, a minister and the “President of Granville College” as it was then. The absence of a Stephen Mead isn't problematic given the twenty unnamed, but it hints that his public profile was minimal. But his wife five years later is mentioned on her passing!

As I said to Lyn Boone, “History is such a keyhole into the vast courtyards of the past…” There is a Henry Mead who marries into the Munson family, so central to our founding narratives of 1805, and Augustine Munson married Polly Mead, but to connect them to Stephen is, so far, impossible.

What is intriguing to me is how much of a cipher he is, other than his Revolutionary War service. He comes to Granville early on, and there are other Mead family members who give us hints of connection, but no detail beyond the one key fact: he served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Without that service, we might not remember him at all, and he could have been another of the empty plots where we know there is a burial, but nothing more.

That general lack of information actually says something, though. It makes me think he was a farmer; the village tradesmen get most of the mentions in the historical record, since they leave more of a mark as clock makers and grocers and blacksmiths.

We may yet learn more about Stephen Mead. That doesn’t need to stop us from remembering him, and being thankful for the service he gave, that helped get us to where we are today, at America 250.

We salute you, Stephen: rest in peace.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he loves a good historical mystery. Tell him what you’ve learned this July at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 6-26-2026

Faith Works 6-26-2026
Jeff Gill

It’s new to you, this country is
___


If I tried to get you to buy a washing machine that was fifty years old, or a car that was a hundred, you’d assume we’re talking about antiques, and you’d be curious about the value.

When I explain my offer was for a working Whirlpool, or a running Duesenberg for everyday use, you would be puzzled. Worse yet, a dress or suit that’s two hundred years old? That should be in a museum, maybe, but not to wear.

Let me offer you the United States of America. It will turn two hundred and fifty years old at the end of next week, and I’d say it’s in running condition. Engine knock? Needs some body work, a little polishing here and there, missing a taillight? Perhaps. But it’s a going proposition.

You would not be the first owner. In truth, Thomas Jefferson or Richard Henry Lee or George Washington could claim that honor; John Hancock,  Samuel Huntington, or Thomas McKean would have had their name on the title (we have a township named for McKean in this county, you know).

As a vehicle of governance, the United States of America is well used, but as the sales folk like to say, “It’s new to you!” The service record is known, and previous mechanics and operators have not always kept up the maintenance as we wish, and in fact it’s coming with some liens on the title, money still owed by previous owners. Encumbered is a word you can use here, I suppose. Getting behind the wheel of the U.S.A. at 250 carries a certain measure of risk, but what’s the alternative? Walk? Ride a bike? There’s no other transportation heading where we’re going.

In my personal faith, I follow a person and example and practices with roots going back 2,000 years; my particular religious tradition looks to 1801 as a key turning point, a kind of birth (there’s 1804 and 1809 which you could call the origin story, I teach a class on this in fact), and we have a 225th birthday celebration down in Kentucky in August. In religion, age is a kind of endorsement, and few think it odd I attend a church that’s got that kind of mileage, or that I preach for a congregation over a century from its origin.

America 250 has evoked some interesting pushback, though. History is a contested thing, and as a historian, I’d first say thus it always has been. Is the battle over who controls our national historical narrative particularly contentious right now? I’m not sure. What I am certain of is that we have good reason to read and reflect and ruminate on our two centuries and a half right now, and I’m happy to be part of all that in this semi-quincentennial year.

We have a particular reason to celebrate this Fourth of July. As I only dimly realized during the Bicentennial summer of 1976, our national experiment in democracy and popular sovereignty is unique among the nations. Other countries have picked up the challenge first laid down by Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress, but nations like Italy or Germany or even France? They are much younger than we are. You could look it up. By 1848 they were still sorting things out; in 1914 and 1939 it was still being tested.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

56 words we’re behind the wheel of, moving forward in them for 250 years. They are a vessel, a vehicle, for human self-understanding, in which we also reflect on how our Creator is working within us as we roll along.

I’ll take it!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s enjoying this year immensely. Tell him what you’ve gotten out of America 250 at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 6-19-2026

Faith Works 6-19-2026
Jeff Gill

Stony the road they trod
___


June 19th has been marked on a national basis for five years now, but Juneteenth has been a significant occasion for the African American community since the first one in 1865.

It’s “Juneteenth” in part because the origins of the celebration come out of Texas, and people enslaved were freed from Galveston on the coast to the inner parts of agricultural Texas all through the latter part of the month, and on into July and even August by the time you get to El Paso. Black citizens of Texas have marked Juneteenth every year since, and as some migrated north, they brought the observance with them.

With the end of the Civil War in April of 1865, there was much concern about what to do for and with freed slaves in the former Confederacy. Lincoln set in motion before his death what had the original title “The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands,” which for obvious reasons became known simply as the Freedmen's Bureau.

It was governed out of the Department of War, with General Oliver Otis Howard the commissioner, and various generals given responsibility for states. Texas, the home of Juneteenth (also known as “Jubilee Day”), had less damage from the previous four years than many Southern states, so the work of what would be called Reconstruction was simpler on one level, but made more complex by the arrival of many people, formerly enslaved, who came to Texas precisely because opportunities to work were more available with less destruction holding recovery back.

Our local connection to all of this is that Perry County’s own Gen. Philip Sheridan was put in charge of the Texas Freedmen’s Bureau, and soon after his right-hand associate was Granville’s Gen. Charles Griffin. Sheridan and Griffin went to work with a will, feeding the hungry at first, building up schools and civic institutions to include African Americans, and leading the push to register them to vote, as well.

The later history of Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureaus is complex and not always a happy story, but Sheridan and Griffin were clearly on the side of inclusion, desegregation, and justice for all; later Griffin was promoted to overall responsibilities as Sheridan moved on, but would soon die young, at the age of 41, from complications of yellow fever during an epidemic outbreak in Texas.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is often a part of Juneteenth commemorations. It looks back to the pain inflicted by slavery, “stony the road we trod” to get to the day of jubilee; it also looks ahead “Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last…” For many in the Black community, Juneteenth is the necessary prelude to the Fourth of July, in any year, but surely also in our semi-quincentennial anniversary of American independence.

Juneteenth is not a church occasion, but if you read historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s “On Juneteenth” you will catch a sense of how the observance has roots in the institutions which endured through and after slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement and into the present day. The symbolism of drinking red pop and eating red beans and other red foods, the songs and stories lifted high on June 19th, all are part of a story of redemption we need to hear and celebrate as a nation.

In our part of Ohio, we have Sheridan and Griffin’s example to connect us to those memories; in those early days after war’s end, it was ironically only the U.S. Army, and the Christian churches, who had the structure and stature to start the rebuilding process, from feeding the desperate, housing those new to Texas or without their former homes, and bringing the community together.

Juneteenth is our story, as a nation, and as people of faith who believe in redemption and transformation. May every voice be lifted in celebration!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he would argue the study of history requires a fair measure of faith. Tell him how you find your hope for the future at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-2-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 7-2-2026
Jeff Gill

From Bicentennial to Semiquincentennial
___


When in the course of human events a nation advances from a bicentennial celebration in 1976 to a semiquincentennial in 2026, it becomes necessary for some columnists to admit fifty years have gone by, a period of time I recall quite distinctly.

Seriously, it’s been the bulk of my adult existence, and as I look back to what I thought about the United States of America as a junior in high school, and compare it to what I think now in this America 250 year, it feels worth asking: what has changed?

There are some historical passages which look very different to me now. One is early in our Midwestern history, as the end of the Revolution turns into the era of European settlement in the old Northwest Territory. Over the last three decades, my awareness of the displacement of indigenous people has gotten sharper and clearer, where before it was a misty presence of scattered “Indians” in the forest, brushed aside as the pioneers came to bring agriculture and civilization where it never had been.

Today, I’m much more conscious of how “Indian Removal” was an act of violence, and almost always a betrayal of previously negotiated treaties, right down to the Wyandot forced departure of 1843. And along with that acknowledgement, there’s some insight that’s come as I look at a landscape once dominated by the figure of Tecumseh. That Shawnee leader was and is a giant in the history of this area, but his younger brother Tenskwatawa, known as “The Prophet” is someone I’ve come to know a bit better. His teachings, his understandings of what was happening to his people, and to Native Americans more generally in the Ohio and Wabash River valleys, have something to say to us today, and are worth recovering.

In 1976, I knew Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration we celebrate each Fourth of July, and I honored him as a “Founding Father.” His relationship with Sally Hemings was something I had not heard of, and I will admit many years later when I did it was something I was initially skeptical about. That is no longer the case; in fact, I think our understanding of Jefferson is all the more complete and constructive for the fact that there is at Monticello an interpretive exhibit that presents the story of Sally Hemings in some detail, bringing forward the reality of slavery on that Virginia plantation, and forcing visitors to confront the inconsistencies of what Jefferson wrote, and what he did.

In many aspects of U.S. history, I am better informed than I was in the 1970s, and not just because I have more information stuffed into my brain. There are perspectives I now have that make the achievement of national independence more precious to me, for the fragility that I know surrounds it. Liberty is made possible by people, doing the right thing, sometimes after they’ve first done the wrong thing.

And “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that” we engage in such reflection and consideration of our past, so we can continue to expand the scope of liberty into the future. Rights and responsibilities in “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” still call on each of us to choose the good, and to do it.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s taught early American history in many settings, academic and otherwise. Tell him how your understanding of our history has changed at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 6-12-2026

Faith Works 6-12-2026
Jeff Gill

Our relationships with our new machine overlords
___


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.