Capernaum, the town Jesus called home --

Faith Works 7-12-08
Jeff Gill

Statistically, It Just Doesn’t Add Up

The Pew Forum survey on the “US Religious Landscape” is jam-packed with stats and numbers, but in many ways it ends up being a commentary on Psalm 14 and James 2:19.

Go ahead, look ‘em up. We’ll be here when you get back.

Find the passages? Great. Anyhow, the point is that for all the detail in the study, the conclusions don’t always add up.

Two people can look at a set of survey numbers and come up with three interpretations, but there are some very interesting trends in the data, or rather, in how writers and reporters are reacting to the data. Let me sort and cherry pick and offer my own misreading and tendentious interpretation (and if you want the link to the big hunk o’ data, navigate over to the newarkdvocate.com home page, and I’ll have the link with the story as posted at the “Notes From My Knapsack” blog).

http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf

A couple juxtapositions – 76% of Americans say there are “many ways” to heaven, and 34% say “every word is true” in the Bible. I think that tells me 10% of us would be really interesting to interview about how we reconcile those two statements.

8% of atheists are “absolutely certain” that God exists, and 10% of self-described atheists (“atheists”?) pray “at least weekly.” Oh, and 12% of atheists believe in Heaven, and 10% in, um, the other place. OK, fine – Hell. 10% of atheists. Is that the 10% I wanted to interview up above? (In this column, not up above in . . . oh, stop it.)

And I know it will sound like I’m piling on here, but these numbers just jump out at you – 9% of atheists say they are “skeptical of evolution.” Can there be an atheistic creationist?

Swinging across the spectrum, 13% of self-defined evangelicals don’t believe in a personal God. Really? 48% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, a working majority (!) versus 45% who disagree (7% were waiting for the next Supreme Court opinion, apparently).

Which gets us closer to the problem with this 270+ page report on a survey of over 30,000 Americans. When the Catholics in this study were asked where they get their views of morality, 22% said primarily from religion, with 57% say it comes from “practical experience and common sense.” Only 9% of Catholics say religion is where they ground their political views – that may be bad news for both Obama and McCain.

There is clearly a sense that American ideals about individual freedom and autonomy trump all, even in matters of faith and doctrine. Except . . . in the survey questions, if you take the time to drill down in the data to where the data comes from, which are the questions people are reacting to, you find that the questions themselves leave no room for doctrine or structured belief to come up.

The first twenty-plus questions don’t mention religion at all; the word “Jesus” is never seen at any point in the survey. The question about Heaven is phrased “Do you think there is a heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded?” Many Christians would say that description bears no resemblance to their beliefs about the world to come, and so do we answer “No?”

And how would you interpret that response?

Which is how you end up with a survey where 21% of atheists believe in God. They aren’t actually measuring anything about faith or beliefs, but about culturally conditioned attitudes toward religion. Their landscape is political and cultural, and I suspect respondents, getting the drift of what they were being asked about, did what Americans do so well – they politely shifted gears to give the answers that they use in public general contexts.

You can argue that there shouldn’t be “two sets” of beliefs (google Goerge Barna for one), but I’ve found there are very few Americans who keep their beliefs right out, oh, on their desk through the week. Most of us have a go-along get-along approach at work and in social life, and a slightly or even strongly structured faith stance at home and in church.

The Pew Forum didn’t get at this distinction at all, and actually built the survey to get the public attitudes only. Does it tell us much about what we do in a voting booth, let alone in Sunday worship? There’s a major survey coming up on Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he relaxes by reading survey data. Tell him something a bit more interesting at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 7-5-08
Jeff Gill

An Errand, Interrupted and Fulfilled

In the back seat, the small boy noticed that his dad’s attention was swinging off the road in front off to one side.

The car slowed, and then bumped along the shoulder to a stop.

“Are we stopping here, dad?”

“Yes, just for a moment.”

“Should I get out?”

“No, son, just stay put. I won’t be long.”

His dad got out of the car, and walked around the front and jumped over a ditch into an unfenced back yard. Just then another car slowed and stopped on the shoulder just ahead, and another man got out of his car.

The boy watched as his father walked into a yard where a flagpole sat in a garden, with a flag dangling in the geraniums and marigolds off of a swinging rope. They had driven through a quick rainstorm preceded by stiff winds just before, and the sun was coming out accompanied by a brisk, erratic breeze.

As the boy’s dad picked the flag gently out of the flowers, he reached up to the pole where a cleat had torn loose from the pole itself. When he began to unclip the flag from the rope hanging off the pulley far above, the other man who had stopped his car walked up.

From where he sat, there was no conversation between the two adult men, just a glance at each other, and as the boy’s dad finished unclipping the United States flag, the other man picked up the striped end of Old Glory just like they had practiced at a Cub Scout meeting a few weeks before.

He watched as they stepped back from each other, smoothly folded the flag lengthwise once, twice, and then stepped even further from each other, pulling the flag taut, as the strange man began to fold and flip the flag into the proper triangles, ending as he should have with an all blue and starry triangle shaped like a tricorn hat. He handed it to the boy’s dad, and stepped back, saluted him, and walked away. The dad walked up to the porch, arms folded over the damp but properly folded flag, laid the neat bundle on a chair by the sliding glass door, and walked back to the car.

When he got inside, the other car had pulled away.

“Dad, did you know that other man?”

“No, son, he must have seen the same thing we did.”

“You mean the flag that blew down?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you know who lives there, Dad?”

“No, but it seems like they put their flag up before the storm blew through, so they wouldn’t have known that it all would have pulled apart like that. We saw it on the ground driving by earlier, and it was still there, so I just wanted to get it off the ground. That must have been what the other fellow thought, too.”

“If you didn’t know him, how did you both know . . . I don’t get it.”

“Son, we both know how to care for the flag, and we both felt bad about seeing it drag around in the dirt. Someone taught each of us to fold a flag properly, so we could work together just fine.”

“So you both just knew?”

“We knew we needed to . . . keep the faith. We owed it to the ones who taught us how to show respect, and those we’re showing respect for. It’s not the flag itself, really, it’s . . .”

“I know – it’s what the flag stands for that we are respecting. And the flag represents our country, right?”

“That’s right. So I hope the people living there don’t mind.”

“Won’t they be glad it was folded right?”

“Sure. And I hope they have some idea why we did it.”

“To get the flag out of the garden, and keep it clean?”

“Well, that; and about keeping the faith, with those . . .”

“Who taught you how to fold it the right way?”

“Sure.”

“You taught me how to fold it right, and we practiced. I bet I could help, next time we see a flag on the ground.”

“Then I won’t even need to have another fellow stop and come help me, will I?”

“Nope! I can help you, uh, keep the faith, Dad.”

“Thank you, Son.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he’s gotten to teach many Cub Scouts how to fold flags at Camp Falling Rock. Tell him about how you’ve taught others to help “keep the faith” at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 6-28-08
Jeff Gill

Calm the Waters, or Inherit the Wind
___

Troubling your own house, Proverbs 11:29 reminds us, is like sowing the whirlwind – you reap the storms you set in motion yourself.

The Licking County Players are bringing “Inherit the Wind” to their stage in July, this 1955 stage play and 1960 movie taking their title from the aforementioned text.

I should warn Brad Lepper that he now shares with me the odd distinction of playing a clergyman onstage, and I’ll be curious about how many cast members ask him theological questions through the rehearsal period.

If you have never seen this classic American play, click over to www.lickingcountyplayers.org and get tickets for their production space over on West Main St. in Newark.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee wrote the play to speak to McCarthyism, which for all its faults provoked a great deal of arts and literature, more than got blacklisted it would appear. I will admit to a certain ambivalence about the body of the play itself, which has many fine set pieces and great monologues and debates.

The fact that it echoes but in no way accurately represents the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee is not a problem. Plenty of great art uses reality as a starting point, but meanders into more productive rivulets and streams and rolls into a mighty river through fiction.

What I trace down to today from that wellspring is the beginning in popular culture of the image of the angry evangelist, the wild-eyed, hot-headed, truth-trimming, ultimately hypocritical preacher fellow who is now so much a stereotype that no comment, seemingly, is necessary.

Popular culture is key here because “Elmer Gantry” was written by Sinclair Lewis in the late 1920’s, but was controversial and not greeted with much approval outside of the literati; a play based on the novel didn’t last a month. The movie, which is how most people know the ol’ rapscallion, played by Burt Lancaster, came out just after “Inherit the Wind” was filmed and only with the major success of the play clearing out the space for it to thrive.

Are there Elmer Gantry and Jeremiah Brown sorts out there, filled with rage and hypocrisy? Yep. I’ve met ‘em, and suspect I can see it in the eyes of more than a few you can catch on TV between requests for money. Steve Martin did a stellar update of the genre which I love, the movie “Leap of Faith.” Go rent it and see what you think.

What I resist is the pull of the notion that Rev. Brown represents much of anything widespread or essential to Christian communities around the US, whether in 1925 or today. In fact, Clarence Darrow could not say enough about the good cheer and courtesy extended him throughout his stay in Dayton, TN by the locals; his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who actually did die in Dayton five days after the trial ended, was a political progressive whose faith led him to rail against greed and robber barons of the “Gilded Age” and Roaring 20’s.

He was also one of far too few who spoke against the growing popularity in the 1920’s of eugenics, the “sterilization of the unfit” and the need to “weed and cull” mental defectives and physically deformed from the “healthy population.” No less a figure in evolutionary studies than Stephen Jay Gould has said that Bryan’s passion was to preach against “Social Darwinsim” more than evolutionary theory itself.

So go see “Inherit the Wind” and reflect on all it has to say about human nature, and eternal ends, but keep in mind the people and personages of the town are not what was, nor are they what is.

Five years after Bryan died, friends and supporters endowed a college in Dayton which is, of course, named “Bryan College.” Their motto is “Christ Above All.” And on Bryan’s tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery (he served as Secretary of State as well as in Congress for Nebraska) are the words “He Kept the Faith.”

The monument I most like for Bryan is another thing not in the play. When the judge found Scopes guilty of teaching evolution and imposed the minimum fine of $100, Bryan insisted on paying it for him.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s got some untold stories about Charles Darwin he wants to tell soon, too. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack – Granville Sentinel, July 2008
Jeff Gill

“Had We But World Enough, and Time”

Andrew Marvell was speaking “To His Coy Mistress,” not to the 2008 election season, but there is a fair sense of urgency in the presentations on both sides of the ballot.

(Pace to all Nader, Paul, and Barr supporters.)

Marvell goes on to hearken to “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and to consider the reams of print material available online, in magazines, and from street corner fliers stuffed into your unwilling hands even a speed reader might sense “Deserts of vast eternity” before them.

May I recommend books? Seriously, if you want to get up to speed with the full range of opinion on both sides, you might find that the old fashioned print volume does you more good than a stack of magazines. You check the table of contents and index for guideposts and benchmarks where your particular interests are addressed, and flipping back and forth is still an area where the technology of printed and bound pages has no peer. (These are all available in the libraries of Granville, Newark, or Denison, too.)

This is all presuming that there are some who haven’t entirely made up their minds, McCainiacs with qualms and Obamacans with hesitations, plus us mushy middle slow thinkers.

Start with their own books: Obama has famously penned his own two, well worth the time to read right through, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” McCain works with Mark Salter of his staff to write “Worth the Fighting For” and “Faith of My Fathers.”

On the current war, whatever you call it, to get a good diversity of views: “Fiasco” by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, along with “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama from the distant past of 1992 to see part of the basis for said leap into the heart of darkness (yeah, and read that, too, in a collected Joseph Conrad). Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” gives the view from inside of the choices that led into Iraq.

“The Assassin’s Gate” by George Packer is the wide view of the Middle East today, and a contrasting but well-reasoned complement is Bernard Lewis’ “The Crisis of Islam.”

Climate change and biotech are intertwined but crucial areas where science and politics intersect with public awareness, and we need to be thinking more clearly than we are about those areas: “Panic in Level 4” is new and excellent, by Richard Preston, author of “The Hot Zone,” and “Cell of Cells” is accessible to the general reader as well thanks to the careful work of Cynthia Fox.

Try the older “Earth In the Balance” from 1992, which reads better than “An Inconvenient Truth” does as a book, both of course by Al Gore; compare to Bjorn Lomborg’s “Cool It.”

And wrap it all up by getting out some Wendell Berry, specifically “The Art of the Commonplace” and “Citizenship Papers.” You might want to read the poetry of “A Timbered Choir” or “The Country of Marriage” just to wash away the taste of politics.

(Psst: Tues., Aug. 12, No Child Left Inside Day!)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a good read or tale or idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.

For anyone wondering why THIS is a good development, or even what all the fuss is about, i want to point out THIS photo, and note that from the right angle with a fuller understanding, we have that kind of awe and beauty and mystery available right here in Licking County.

If the National Park Service can help us get to that level of access and understanding, enabling people to see the slopes and arcs of the earthworks the way most people reflexively see the meaningfulness of fluted columns and Ionic capitals, then welcome aboard NPS!

Notes From My Knapsack 6-26-08
Jeff Gill

No Child Left Inside – Sounds Good To Me!

Get ‘em up, get ‘em out, get ‘em bit.

Here’s my thought: can we just declare Tuesday, August 12, “No Child Left Inside Day” for Licking County?

Oh, you ask, is there a special program or event or planned activity on that date?

Nope.

That would be the point. No agenda or checklist, just kids and everything that isn’t under a roof and within HVAC serviced walls.

To be fair, I’m swiping this idea from the good folks with Project Learning Tree and their website www.learnoutside.org, supported by the Environmental Education Council of Ohio at www.eeco-online.org.

Their concern is to keep environmental education at the forefront of thinking about formal, classroom education and curricula, and I support them in their admirable endeavours. We’ve all been motivated and inspired by Richard Louv’s necessary book “Last Child In the Woods,” but that’s exactly why I’d like to suggest a Licking County “No Child Left Inside” on a Tuesday, before school starts in those classrooms, with no formal program at all.

Louv’s useful and worrisome account shows how we’ve somehow let ourselves become convinced that children are at more danger from random violence, vicious animals, and Lyme disease out roaming the woodlots and fields, than they might be endangered by the effects of sloth and obesity and sedentary electronic numbness – and I don’t just mean in their hind ends.

Just as we’ve learned the hazards of making playgrounds so safe kids no longer want to play on them, leading to lack of exercise or activity which is truly dangerous in a subtle but very real way, we need to get real about Nature.

Nature is all around us and inside our bloodstream and yes, even under our fingernails even with antibacterial soap. We need to get comfortable with soil and moss and bark and rocks again, let alone worms and mantises (yes, that creature in “Kung Fu Panda” actually exists!) and know how to behave around opossums and raccoons and even deer.

Yeah, deer. I’m fine with hunting them, but for the foreseeable future we will share our neighborhoods and our hosta with them. Do our kids know how to move around and respond to an apparently tame deer (hint: they aren’t, and their hooves can disembowel you if you aren’t careful).

Animals of all sorts deserve care and respect, which I think can include a compound bow on occasion (if you don’t believe me, watch the first five minutes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Russell Means in “The Last of the Mohicans,” a sequence that will earn the respect of a committed vegan). Kids deserve the chance to encounter Nature writ small in order to develop a proper respect of her larger manifestations, whether cervids or cyclones.

So I want to suggest this simple idea – make Tuesday, August 12 a day when we all commit to making sure that every kid spends some time outdoors, gets their knees dirty, and brings a rock home in their pockets. I’ll have some further suggestions in future weeks, but what about it? “No Child Left Inside Day” for Licking County.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your “Wild Kingdom” moment at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 6-21-08
Jeff Gill

Party A and Party B Approach the Counter


June is the month for weddings, and California wants us to be in the mood for love.

You’ve heard about the big news in California, no doubt, where the blanks on marriage licenses are no longer labeled “Bride” and “Groom” but “Party A” and “Party B.”

How to decide which half of the couple gets to be A and who’s stuck with B we leave for future litigation . . . and there will be litigation, of that there is no doubt whatsoever.

Just in case I haven’t bothered and confused everyone, here’s what I see coming. In the not-too-distant future, “civil union for the purposes of maintaining a joint household” will be the norm, with special provisions for said unions with children under the law.

In other words, we’re all looking at “Party A” and “Party B” someday soon when it comes to the legal portion of what we currently call “marriage.”

Keep this in mind – clergy already have a state-mandated, legal hoop through which we jump, in order to have the legal standing to “solemnize” or legally sign a valid license to marry. The hoop is neither tiny nor high, but there is a hoop (and when I got mine, it was $10 to Sherrod Brown, but I suspect that’s gone up). To make valid a license issued by the Licking County Common Pleas Court under the Juvenile-Probate Court, you need a judge, a mayor, a magistrate, or a religious leader certified by the Secretary of State to have the limited, quasi-notary like power to sign said license.

What religious people may not entirely understand is that while there is currently a major overlap between church language and state language on marriage, this is going to change. What we need to protect is the right of religious groups and clergy to conduct “weddings” only for those parties they understand to be in a position to enter into a valid marriage. This may or may not overlap with the state categories, which will go through a wide range of changes these next few election cycles.

And I’m willing to say that’s all well and good for any state, or the State of Ohio, as long as you don’t try to force Catholic Christian priests to conduct marriage ceremonies for those who have been married and divorced, or Evangelical Christian pastors to join same-sex couples together, and so on. The “civil right” of a religious body to affirm whichever couples they see fit to join within their religious tradition will need defending.

Likewise, we religious folk need to understand that words like marriage and wedding and solemnize will be steadily emptied of their theological meaning, if not removed entirely from the wording of the Ohio Revised Code, requiring us to be ever more clear about what we mean when we use those words in church.

And we religious folk will really appreciate it if those in favor of civil unions, or gay marriage, or whatever phrase is popularly accepted, understand that aside from theological scruples, there are quite a few folks who are not even faith oriented at all, who join with various faith communities to ask: Do we know what it is we’re monkeying around with here? Do we really get it that treating the partners, entering into a shared home with the assumption of the possibility of children, as interchangeable units regardless of gender or commitment, could become an experiment with massive unintended consequences?

To which the usual chorus of “yes, but slavery and racism and xenophobia were around for a long time, too, along with kings and hereditary nobility, so tradition and so-called revelation may not be as reliable as you think” will rise up.

And in fact traditional churchgoers need to consider and repent of the fact that the relative inevitability of “Party A” and “Party B” has not a little to do with the widespread and casual acceptance of cohabitation and simple divorce within faith communities. If we thought marriage between a man and a woman was such a special, important thing, our actions don’t show it much, says the watching society around us. I’m talking within churches, let alone in society at large.

If we value it so little, the argument goes, then why not let those who want so much to share it have their share of the institution?

And so the experiment begins. The New York Times, bellwether of all things avant-garde, assures us that gay marriage will teach us all new ways to make marriage work even better.

The Times is also where we read in 1921 and 1936 that a rocket will never leave the Earth’s atmosphere. To be fair, they ran a retraction in July of 1969 of those assertions.

Jeff Gill is writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 6-14-08
Jeff Gill

Things That Aren’t Optional, Are They?

“Would you be interested in the extended warranty?”

You’ve heard that question, I’m sure, and I trust you’ve answered, “Uh, no.”

The big profit generator of recent years in retail has been to invite folks to pay extra for quality and reliability, or at least the guarantee of same.

Some call them service agreements, or a long-term service contract, or maintenance agreements. A prolonged warranty means that if you expect your goods or products to be worth purchasing, you need to pay a bit extra for that benefit. Y’know, for what you thought you were buying in the first place – quality, reliability, and standing behind your product.

You can still get that, but yer gonna pay.

Apparently fatherhood is an optional add-on now. Not that you can’t find fathers here and there, but more and more a father is an extra, almost an inconvenience, for which . . . ok, the analogy breaks down here, since they pay for the privilege of being considered a father under the law. You can do things the old way (dating, marriage, pregnancy, driving your wife to the hospital, fatherhood), but that’s going the way of getting what you pay for up front, instead of being a kind of extended warranty on your kids’ development.

As a dad, I’ve spent a goodly part of the last week driving back and forth to Camp Falling Rock out Rocky Fork way in northeastern Licking County. Summer entrance up top, helping the parking crush down at the “winter entrance” by historic Franklin Lodge, means getting out early and walking down Foxfire Trail to the flag field below Lake Peewee. 475+ kids are a new record for Cub Scout Day Camp (congrats Ric and Angie Eader for an awesome job directing), and with the loss of the Rocky Fork bridge, access is tight, tight, tight.

Coming into camp early, there’s a spot before I get to Falling Rock that has made me start slowing down in awe and delight, before I have press on to get to camp on time. There’s a home that’s being renovated up in Eden Township, and along one end of the ell, after pulling off siding and sheathing and lath and such . . .

It turns out the core of the old house isn’t just old – it’s a log cabin. Looks to me like 1820 or even earlier, yellow poplar logs shaped by broadaxe and square-joined on the corners. The act of fixing up the house has revealed the foundation of the house, its origins, the history.

Strong, solid, stable, the log cabin was there all along, but long unsuspected (I suspect). After the new sheathing and siding, and the passing of a few years, maybe even a change of owners, and the fact of the undergirding structure could be forgotten again.

It’s as we take apart the structure that we have a chance to see the roots, the origins, the reliable sub-text to what has held up the roof and kept out the weather all along.

Recent years and ongoing challenges to the very nature of marriage and family has peeled off boards and yanked siding away to reveal the basic structure beneath.

We step back from the demo work and look at the actual bones of the building and have a chance to ask – What is necessary? What is vital? What makes the core structure?

We have the chance in these rapidly changing days to assess what we think is necessary, having peeled back quite a bit of the façade of marriage and family. Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and before we start nailing up new vinyl siding or trim over the top of what is essential, we need to look at the main support beams and structural members, and figure out what needs primary maintenance.

Fathers are close to the center of the institution of family. You may be able to ornament the exterior enough to forget that those beams and rafters are there, but if you are responsible for long-term upkeep, you’d better keep them in mind.

Happy Father’s Day to every dad who’s trying to hold up his end of the deal. There’s a few stresses on the foundation, but the basic design is sound, and will hold up fine with a little preventative care. A new tie here, a fishing trip there, or maybe a little camping, and things will hold together just fine.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a Father’s Day story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 6-12-08
Jeff Gill

Why A Knapsack?

Howdy!

You may have read one of my columns before, and I’ve written the stray piece or two for the Sentinel, but an introduction seems in order.

I’ve lived in Licking County since 1989 with a sojourn in West Virginia, and resided in Granville since 2004. That makes me a new guy, but with my historical interests, I get to sound like I’ve been around here for ages.

My knapsack represents the odd stuff I pick up as I meander around the terrain of the Land of Legend, and then I pull items out and tell stories about them. The knapsack is not quite entirely virtual, but pixels and links are more and more part of what I lug around.

Six months or so ago a very rude and profane site called Cracked.com (you’ve been warned) ran a very useful piece about “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.” This is exactly the kind of bright shiny object I pick up and stuff in my knapsack and bring out later to tell you about, and this summer seems like a good time to pull out this one.

Number one is that we don’t have enough annoying strangers in our lives. Sound crazy? Here’s David Wong’s point in a nutshell: “The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.” And we can use technology to edit all kinds of everyday aggravation out of our day – this may not be as good a deal as you might think.

Two: We don’t have enough annoying friends, either. No, really. Older folks grew up in towns they had to go fight Hitler to get out of; lacking Hitler, you had to learn to get along with some real hard cases (not to say head cases).

Three and Four are about texting and e-mail, and the fact that they are forms of communication, but just barely. If anthropologists can tell us that 93 percent of a statement’s impact is communicated non-verbally, no wonder we get so many misunderstandings with virtual comm. 7% doesn’t give us much margin for error.

Five has to do with the fact that we handle criticism poorly, but can dish it out invisibly, behind masks and aliases, instantly and around the world. Six speaks to the “Outrage Machine,” which is a whole column in itself .

And Seven addresses why we “feel worthless,” suggesting that it’s “because we actually are worth less. There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you.”

We’re working on building a new Granville in the middle of the olde village, a smaller place where folks knew each other face to face, over the butcher’s block and around the blacksmith’s forge. We want those vital connections, but we want out wi-fi, too.

My plan is to keep picking up those pieces of the older way of being, and keep looking for ways to fit them into the mosaic of a diverse, new, but tradition rich Granville. Hope you’ll enjoy puzzling along the path with me!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 6-8-08
Jeff Gill

Six and a half years ago, about 340 weekly columns before this one alongside a smattering of cover stories and stray features, I got a chance to write for the Booster.

Maybe it was “The Community Booster” then, or we should say “Booster Snapshots” now, or you may just say “that free weekly thing the Advocate folks put out,” but it’s part of the long, proud history of print journalism in Licking County.

The Advocate is the oldest continuously operating business in Licking County, starting in 1820. They get the nod for printing under the same name, even as owners and editors have changed (kind of like an inn, come to think of it, but while The Buxton Inn’s building goes back straight to 1812, they’ve had a few different names through the centuries).

Benjamin Briggs was a young man in an unprepossessing town when he printed the first issues in 1820; the Advocate has seen many competitors over the years come and go, buying and being bought by some of those business concerns.

The Newspaper Network of Central Ohio is part of the larger Gannett Corporation, of which “USA Today” is our cousin. They are diversifying out into various print and online media formats, which means new opportunities for some . . .

. . . and endings for others. This is, I’m told, the last “Booster” (however you dress up the name, “Booster” has been good enough for most purposes). You’ll still see “The Advertiser” showing up in bags and bunches hither and yon, as our free weekly for a now multi-county area, with news highlights from our “Advocate” colleagues.

“The Granville Sentinel” was a competitor through the 1970’s and 80’s with “The Granville Booster,” both weeklies in the shadow of the legendary “Granville Times” and all the way back to Sereno Wright’s “The Wanderer” that rose up to dispute Newark’s upstart newspaper in 1822. (Sereno was a printer from Vermont who had put out a “Weekly Wanderer” back East from 1801 to 1811, so the printer’s ink runs deep in Licking County veins, back to the auld sod.)

I’m delighted to say that “Notes From My Knapsack” will have some kind of regular place in the pages of the “Sentinel,” where the Op-Ed pages host a distinguished company of columnists, like Bill Nichols and Scottie Cochrane’s husband, plus a guy who’s always right.

This, I cannot claim.

So the torrent of verbiage will be diverted, but not stilled. Many of you have been kind enough to share your corrections, dissentions, and disputations with me by e-mail and in person on sidewalks and buffet lines all over Licking County, and I truly have been enriched by those interactions. My best hope is that between the “Sentinel” and my weekly “Faith Works” column in the Saturday Advocate, and perhaps even preaching or telling a story in your neck of the woods, we’ll all stay in touch.

Friends, it has been a pleasure.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; you can still tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, and who knows where it will come out, but it’s all grist for the mill, which still turns.

Faith Works 6-7-08
Jeff Gill

VBS Is Better Than CBS, NBC, & ABC Put Together!

School’s out for the Little Guy, so we were walking down the street on a sunny weekday morning when a blimp flew overhead, going opposite our direction.

We stopped to crane our necks and watch (he’s 10, so not too awful long), and marvel at the size and delicacy of the huge oval shape sliding almost silently past us.

Then we went on to climb Sugarloaf in Granville with a hundred of our closest friends!

This rain has kept kids indoors, just as we got them back from their public education calendar, and likely has quite a few of us parents at home thinking of Vacation Bible School.

VBS is one of those old traditions that is being repackaged for modern tastes, like praise worship and screen projection in worship or e-mail newsletters. There are still some traditional models rolling down the road, and different ways to do VBS right around the corner.

Starting this week, many congregations will hold a series of sessions, some in the morning, quite a few in the evening. Many will start Monday bright and early, while a few hold a registration night on Sunday. More and more you see churches hold their closing ceremony on Thursday, since so many families head away Friday after work, but others plow right through to Saturday.

In Granville, many of the downtown churches do a joint “Ecumenical VBS” which is this week, rotating locations and responsibilities and sharing the work and the joy.

(I’d drop by, but this is also the week of Cub Scout Day Camp at Camp Falling Rock, where oddly enough I’ll be . . . telling stories; they start on Tuesday, with a picnic and closing on Friday and a few of the older Cubs camping out that evening.)

Down in Buckeye Lake, Water’s Edge Ministry is offering a VBS at 11 am from Monday to Thursday for the next week, June 14 to 17. And I get to tell some stories about Joseph and his sibling rivalries at that one!

So if you’re thinking about VBS for your kids, a few friendly reminders to all. First, check the days and times, because “they way we’ve/they’ve always done it” isn’t, anymore. Just because your neighbor says “oh, I’m sure it starts tomorrow” doesn’t mean anything – drive by and look for a sign, since most churches with a VBS put one out, along with posters down at the local businesses or restaurants.

And if you are driving around the county, and think “hey, didn’t I see the same sign and theme somewhere else?” – you aren’t losing your mind! There are a number of Christian publishing companies that put together “VBS kits” with a theme each summer and includes posters and banners and all the curriculum materials, and it’s pretty common for more than one church in an area to buy the same kit.

What that doesn’t mean is that, if you’re used to having your kid go to multiple VBS’s, that it will be the same. Everyone personalizes their kit, and no two churches will use the package in quite the same way.

Finally, if you’re thinking about wanting to check out a church but don’t actually attend there, and wonder “will my child be welcome there?” The not-so-secret secret is that folks like you are a big reason behind why congregations put on Vacation Bible School. Part of the reason is to give a big boost to the kids’ chances to learn faith content and Bible teachings, but reaching out to families that haven’t decided to attend on Sundays is even bigger.

It really can be a chance to see the inside of the building dressed however you normally would on a weekday, talk to some of the members without feeling any “when do I stand up or sit down” pressure, and at the closing you’ll get a taste of the worship and teachings of that church.

The next two weeks will see ‘em sprout like mushrooms around Licking County, and often there’s another burst of ‘em at summer’s end right before school starts; but there will hardly be a week these next couple months when there isn’t a VBS in session somewhere near you.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s told stories at quite a few VBS’s, where you have the audience’s complete attention until someone says “Snack Time!” Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-31-08
Jeff Gill

Ringing Up the Summer

What can I say that you don’t already know about gas prices, food costs, and the economy?

When talking heads say food costs are up 5% or so, they sound grim enough, but it seems as if the actual cost of stuff I buy regularly is up more like 15 to 20%, and convenience items are up even farther and faster

What I can say is that the trend lines are going to keep going up. The situation with global energy supplies is going to tighten, and that will increase prices for oil and natural gas which move food prices up faster than almost anything else.

Which will put more stress on the economy generally.

We have a role to play in moving towards more energy conservation and sensible, sustainable national energy policy, from our own use of natural resources to how we vote next November. If I made my living off of people taking long, leisurely trips in their cars, I’d worry right now.

For churches, that may mean fewer people gone for long stretches this summer, but it may also add up to more weekend in-state outings, so the impact on attendance is harder to predict than gas prices.

We will almost certainly see an impact on giving in the offering plates around Licking County.

Summer is often a stressful time for congregational budget makers and managers, since folks who give weekly often miss a goodly number of Sundays and don’t always make up their giving for those weeks, or wait until after Labor Day. Meanwhile, bills still come in about as regularly as they do in October or April. If your church doesn’t carry much of a cushion, there can be few options for a pastor or treasurer.

To put it bluntly, it can mean no paychecks in August if all the dominoes fall the wrong way.

So the usual plea goes out, and I’ll echo – don’t forget your regular giving at home during vacation time. No matter how solid the circumstances of your faith community, cash flow crunches can create real problems for outreach and ministry.

Some folks even wonder about how to support their church after they leave on an, um, permanent vacation. If you are doing estate planning, take your annual giving, multiply it times 20, and that amount in a memorial account should produce your annual gift in perpetuity. Talk to the folks over at the Licking County Foundation or your bank’s trust department to see if I’m talking sense or not.

Meanwhile, this may be a very good summer to look at your church and church building and think about energy consumption. Do you have automatic thermostats? Sensor lights in bathrooms, that kick on when someone enters and kick off after a long enough time of no motion?

What about solar panels on the roof? Geothermal in the lawn? Or just having the trustees change the filters in the HVAC system?

A few words from www.theoildrum.com that have an impact on what stewardship might need mean: “Oil is still very cheap. Bottled spring water at $2 per litre works out at $318 per barrel. Oil is fundamental to our lives for transportation and a myriad products ranging from plastic to pesticides. Unlike spring water, oil is finite and costs significantly more to find and produce. The price of oil will continue to rise until the world as a whole decides it can do with less or until meaningful volumes of energy substitution take root.”

Speaking as a Christian pastor, the only commodities I’m called upon to preach as limitless are God’s love, and Christ’s forgiveness. Creation itself is made to exist within limits, the bounds set by God “in the beginning” for this life, and our living of that gift.

If we continue to live as if the limits of creation do not apply to us, then we are setting ourselves up as gods, and there is a price to pay for that kind of ultimate misunderstanding. From the Tower of Babel to the Golden Calf to Annanias and Sapphira, when we choose to step across certain limits, there are consequences. Our way of life can be scattered, dispersed, even ended.

Will we find our place, or be forced to accept certain consequences? “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. . .” and it may be time to conserve and not consume. Or wait for $5 and even $8 a gallon to teach us what Ecclesiastes is saying in this generation.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he keeps a little solar fan in a western window, just because. Tell him how you plan to conserve creation at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 6-1-08
Jeff Gill

Engage Your Mind, 360 Degrees

If you have been past the website of the mothership, www.newarkadvocate.com, you know that a major redesign has worked through the whole deal.

You can click for “home” and get the main, frequently updated site; you can also pick up links off the edge of the header for our sister publications, the “Pataskala Standard” and “Granville Sentinel,” along with targeted content for other regions of Licking County like Licking Valley and Heath, along with those ubiquitous “Buckeye Moms” who apparently like to chat.

Just below the main news content is a row of links for blogs (short for weblogs), which are created and generated entirely off of the newarkadvocate.com website. Yep, you’ll see “Knapsack” posting there, along with an assortment of regular bloggers who run the gamut from retired professional journalists to anonymous high school drop-outs.

There are still chances to comment on stories and post to forums as the old website had, but with a bit more integration of content crosswise between areas of the site entire. Once you register as a user, with or without your funky little logo (mine is a picture of me telling stories, natch), you have your own header which allows you to jump about posting comments or putting up longer comments at your blog.

Folks can recommend your blog, put your on their watch list, or leave you messages, all within the website itself. It’s a cool thing.

Plenty of voices have whimpered anxiously that blog culture occupies the same relationship to civil dialogue that yogurt culture has to Rachmaninoff. Could be – there is certainly a fair amount of moonbattery fluttering around “Recent Blogs” or “Featured Blog” headers at newarkadvocate.com.

There have also been picture galleries uploaded from everyday citizens, proud parents, and prom goers, news analysis from former employees who should be taken with a grain of salt, but have some salty perspective you wouldn’t hear about otherwise, and comments that completely change how you read a story or editorial.

Obviously, I think blog culture is a good thing. In fairness, it doesn’t support a vocation, but is it taking jobs away from journalists or saving the positions that will remain when the e-phenomenon finishes sweeping through the country? Hard to tell so far, but the news biz is clearly changing, and the trick is to stay one step ahead.

Because if it takes four, five months for even a limber management structure to make major changes, writers and photographers and other “content providers” need to stay at least half-a-year out ahead just to stay even. If you don’t like dealing with reader response, this is not going to be a congenial business to be in for the foreseeable future.

Just as doctors and pharmacists have had to get used to internet savvy patients asking oddly precise questions about their condition and treatment, and mechanics or used car salesfolk are forced to adjust to customers who know the Blue Book value before they can look it up, the news biz is shifting how we relate to our readers.

The web site is one small, but very significant way to do just that. Click on over and check it out!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who’s been on-line (he said smugly) since 1979 when a big honkin’ e-mail account allowed 5K of storage. Tell him about your internet adaptations at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Well, this is nowhere near as bad as i feared --

Movie Reviews

Faith Works 5-24-08
Jeff Gill

Try To Remember

Memory is a strange thing. Somewhere in all that grey goo is a series of electrical impulses vibrating off of chemical connections, that we access by a sequence of relatedness, from dim early childhood images to last week’s phone number we were trying to call today.

What we remember is not what “is,” but is the impression the “is-ness,” the actuality had on our subjectivity, stuck in that grey goo. We carry an arrangement of impressions with us that get sorted and dealt into patterns, stories and pictures and even movies made out of what is etched on our brain in chemical traces. Those impressions have the tendency to shift and move over time, even when we have no need to misrepresent, let alone misremember.

So we develop aids to memory – symbols on cave walls, letters on papyrus, carved statues, cast inscriptions in bronze. It’s amazing how much actually sticks on the brain, informally ordered, when we turn to our distant history and catch ourselves amazed by the effect of a small sound, or a slight scent.

Framed photos are now animated, or at least electronically flip past on the end table, and we can add a voice or a song to a chip on the back. These aids to memory almost, but not quite, keep pace with the tricks memory can play, especially as the years pile up. There are problems of biology, prions and eroded sheaths and tumors, which all can eat away at that precious pile of recollection. Our medical attempts to maintain the brain and body can nibble down the sharp edges with pharmaceuticals and cut big holes with surgery.

We learn, too, from such events that there is in the substructure of the mind a resilience that often can wire around such holes – and yes, fill in gaps wholesale with made-up memories sometimes – but the fundamental integrity of how our memory relates to what was, what “is” can still be trusted, else all of life would be an untrustworthy illusion.

Which makes it OK to be a little vague on dates (was that ’43? Maybe ’44 was when he died…) and sometimes even names (we just called him Jake, but look at that, his name was Jeremiah…) when we have pillars of stone and brass plates and documents of proclamation to lean on.

Our need for a Memorial Day, and we need one ourselves as much as the honored dead deserve the honor, is to remind ourselves how fragile and precious memory is. To paraphrase Paul, what we want to remember, we cannot, and what we do not wish to remember we cannot forget. That is a lesson of Memorial Day as well.

We need this solemn ceremonial gathering, this reverent processing behind flags and bands, this time for tender maintenance of family markers on our hands and knees, so we can put in perspective what we do recall, and what we need to remember, and how we smooth over the gaps between those two realities.

We need Memorial Day, even if, especially if, this area has no family or personal connections for us. There is a realization about the nature and function of memory that comes from walking down a line of gravestones, a series of names and dates and few puzzling inscriptions, knowing none of them.

In Deuteronomy and Zechariah and in the Letter to the Hebrews, the refrain “remember” is at the heart of religious observance, but it includes remembering things that God has not yet done, but has promised to do, in which we can trust; and that God has promised to NOT remember certain things at the End of Days, for which we can be thankful.

In Deuteronomy 24 – “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing...Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” Can we remember something that didn’t happen to us?

Yes we can, and sometimes we should. On Monday, remember Valley Forge and Lundy’s Lane and the Somme and Omaha Beach and Pelieu and Pusan and Khe San and that bump in the road outside of Basra. Remember it all as yours, for a time, and join with others as we remember our debts and the ones who forgave those debts for us.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio (and will be preaching at First Baptist this Sunday in Newark); let him know what you remember at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-25-08
Jeff Gill

If You Need a Reminder

Monday is Memorial Day, or “Memorial Day (Observed)” as many calendars remind us.

We’ve mostly forgotten the story of the Grand Army of the Republic, with many of her members laid to rest in the GAR section of Cedar Hill and other Licking County cemeteries under the slanting barrels of Civil War cannon.

Gen. John Logan, commander of the veteran’s association and senator from Illinois, called for the thirtieth day of May to serve as a time set apart for memory, for decoration and maintenance of memorials to the War Between the States. . . in 1868.

About a hundred years later we got forgetful, and had trouble remembering much more than weekends, except when a Monday holiday extended the time for grilling and shopping, and Memorial Day went to the last Monday in May, which is good enough most years.

Except we have to remember to get up, and join a parade or a procession or simply to stand and salute (Left hand? Right hand? Take off hat? Can’t recall…), to put out the flag (where did we put that old thing?) and figure out where the cemetery is, anyhow.

We remember with aids to memory in the paper (list of Memorial Day observances), the flag that the neighbor who was in the service once, long ago, always puts out, with bunting on courthouses and flags off of light poles.

Our communal recollection is assisted by granite and brass, old limestone slowly crumbling and carved letters faintly legible. Those cannons are quaint, but once deadly serious. The flagpoles often need a coat of metallic paint, hard to get up to the bronze eagle high above and harder still to get out of your clothes, so it isn’t always done when it might be.

There are plaques with names, letters upraised seeking our attention, letters carven deep pulling us in. Names with a familiar ring to them, recalling streets and roads and faded labels on mailboxes just down the block, along with names that don’t mean a thing, but bring us to a pause just the same.

Age we know to be cruel when it comes to memory. There are things that no one should forget – a spouse’s face, a friend’s laugh – and yet the years can steal them in life, let alone in death. We’ve all seen how a blank stare can wound when it comes from someone who has forgotten.

Is it any better to see the collective amnesia of faces who should know, but do not, what it means to see the commonplace sacrifice of four elderly men, slowly walking under the proud burden of color guard banners? How cruel is the forgetting of that oblivion?

Formality is certainly a lost art, or at least a forgotten one. Fedoras and white gloves and bowing at an introduction belong to a former age. That’s a page which has been turned, and having turned, will not look back.

Do salutes and pledges and brass polish and careful arrangements of flowers belong to that chapter, or can we write them anew on the blank page ahead? Remembering is often a question of writing something down, I’ve found. We should make a note to set up the flagpole and join the parade and salute the flag, what she has stood for and what she might yet represent.

Or you could just clip this and stick it on the fridge. Whatever helps you remember Memorial Day.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you remember at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-17-08
Jeff Gill

The Big Sit

With my wedding anniversary, our son’s birthday, and other family complications coming up this week, this column may be a bit of a muddle (as opposed to your other columns, some might ask?).

My best efforts are aimed at Highwater Congregational UCC on Dutch Lane, north of Granville and south of Homer, where Torie Front, their pastor, is graduating today from seminary! To help buffer a busy week of ordination interviews (I heard she passed) and the honor of preaching the baccalaureate service, I’m preaching their 8:30 and 10:30 am services tomorrow. (Then I get to come back into Newark for First Baptist, to preach a Memorial Day themed message next Sunday!)

What I have left over for y’all starts with a note from a pastor posted to a website for a company called “Church Chair,” thanking them for an excellent product:

“It was a very important decision and I wanted to do the right thing. In ministry you’re always balancing between providing the best at the most affordable price. Church seating is a big decision because the majority of a person’s church experience is spent there.”

Owwww. That may well be true, but to casually admit it feels a little awkward. The majority of a person’s church experience is spent sitting in a chair. I say again, owwww.

Torie has carried her sense of ministry from a seat in the sanctuary to a saddle and classroom desk set and a perch next to a hospital bed doing chaplaincy – not more seat time in church than elsewhere, I’m thinking.

Kudos to Central Christian Church in Newark, and their friends from Moss Point, MS, who drove up to join them in rebuilding the town of Greensburg, KS. I’m thinking a week spent in mission efforts (say 10 hours a day times 6, making 60) does a fair amount to balance out 52 hours of seat time in a sanctuary.

Hooray for Habitat for Humanity, with 20 years of work in Licking County, and about that many homes made available to families who put in their sweat equity, more than compensating for seat time between partners and founders like Ken Klatt and Richard Downs.

“Church seating is a big decision because the majority of a person’s church experience is spent there.” That may be true, and no one may be bragging about it, but I’m just thinking that any person of faith has good reason to want to work on swinging the balance back the other way.

Where do you spend your “church experience” time? If you bustle in a basement kitchen making ham loaf for a reception after the family gets back from the cemetery and the committal service, bless you; you don’t spend a majority of your time in a pew or modular seating. You’re lucky to sit down at all.

If your church experience is as a “Wood Samaritan” in a congregation like Centenary UMC in Granville, you may lean over a lathe as much as you sit back into a century old cherry wood pew. Nice pews, but still . . .

Planning this summer for autumn “Fifth Quarter” gatherings in area high schools, as some good folk in Licking Valley do each year, you lean against plenty of concrete block walls, but sitting is not part of the ministry job description there. “They also serve who only lean and nod . . .”

“Church seating is a big decision because the majority of a person’s church experience is spent there.” I’m not going to say that isn’t a true statement, but shouldn’t most of us feel convicted by those words, and want to make them less accurate?

There is a time for every purpose under heaven -- a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to set up chairs and a time to put chairs away; a time for gathering up seating arrangements, and a time to set such things aside, roll up your sleeves, and get to work showing forth God’s love.

Where do you spend most of your church experience?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him where you have your church experiences at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-18-08
Jeff Gill

Notes To a Commencement Speaker

Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, received an honorary degree from Denison University last weekend, and was the commencement speaker for the Class of 2008.

He seemed from a distance to be a charming and thoughtful man, who was aware of the significance of the day for the 5,000 family members crowded into the Mitchell Center on a rainy Mother’s Day afternoon. So he kept the focus on the grads and the future and the brightness thereof, without casting too many shadows across their still developing path.

That’s no doubt as it should be, but I’ll admit to wishing that, as one of our nation’s leading writers and scholars in the area of global climate change, Dr. Cicerone had said a bit more to the graduates on the way out the door on his subject and their future.

What I kept thinking about, looking across that mortarboarded band about to disperse to their jobs and job searches, Fulbrights and fellowships, to the Peace Corps and to parts of Wall Street, where they will trade abstract entities they can’t quite explain but can quickly price . . .

Dr. Cicerone reminded them that Americans use five times as much energy as other world citizens. That’s no doubt true, while the Department of Energy says the ratio is really six times global energy consumption.

I might prefer to point out that we have an energy deficit in this country that can’t be sustained, producing over 70 quadrillion BTUs while burning up 100 quadrillion of the little buggers. That other 30 Q comes out of our hide, financially, politically, and yes, to a certain degree, morally.

And while I take second place to no one, let alone the President of the United States, in my admiration of the marvelous powers of “switchgrass” (check transcripts of old State of the Union addresses), my trust in biofuels and geothermal and other uses of Greek prefixes to solve our energy needs someday is pretty minimal.

The greatest source of new energy resources in this country isn’t in ANWR or Athabascan oil sands or deeper mining of Wyoming coal. It’s in figuring out how to improve fuel efficiency in our vehicles and myriad other conservation techniques and tricks which can cut our energy consumption by a third with the speed we need. Is there any way to do that short of $200 a barrel oil and $7 a gallon gas? We’re running a brief pre-test of this question right now, and short-term declines won’t mean the test is cancelled.

Most of all, I wish the graduates had been challenged to think about the fact that they were about to radically change their carbon footprint just by leaving campus. Even if you didn’t live at the Homestead, or even go out once for a nice lentil casserole, you lived more energy efficiently by being part of a campus. Your energy consumption was much less than the American norm because you shared living space and transport issues and power generation and meal prep. The total carbon output of your everyday lifestyle is about to go back to the current American baseline of radically individualized, one person per car, separate residence, mower and trimmer in every garage, atomized and particularized personal gear for everything.

What choices can you make, Class of 2008, as you go out into the world, that would preserve some of the community and collaborative values that were yours for the having here on campus? To maintain even a portion of those shared advantages will, from this day forward, take intention and effort for you to put them at the center of your lives: will you make that effort?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-10-08
Jeff Gill

Faith Of Our Mothers, Living Still

Frederick Faber was not writing a hymn about Mom when he wrote “Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.”

And in Grafton, West Virginia back to 1908, Anna Jarvis was not thinking about warfare, spiritual or otherwise, when she began her fight for a day set aside to honor mothers, particularly her own.

You’ve no doubt already heard the story about Ann Jarvis, tireless worker for health and sanitation through the Civil War and advocate for community causes of all sorts, whose daughter Anna decided that she and all mothers deserved a special commemoration all their own after her death on May 9, 1905.

So in Grafton, West Virginia, she set aside the second Sunday of May, when the trees were all in bloom and the Appalachian spring was at its height, beginning with a few friends at home in 1907, leading to the first official “Mother’s Day” event at her Methodist church this week (this very day!) 100 years ago.

Next was the governor of West Virginia, then the General Conference of the Methodist Church (not United back then), Congress made a proclamation, and finally President Woodrow Wilson made it nationally official in 1914.

Now, “Mother’s Day” is not an official part of the Christian Year from Advent to Lent through Eastertide to . . . Pentecost, which is what tomorrow should be, 50 days (“pente”) following Easter itself. Then is the long, hard slog through “Ordinary Time” until the first Sunday of Advent sets the liturgical year in motion again.

Pentecost marks the birth of the church told in Acts, chapter 2, with the descent of the Holy Spirit on the believers in Jerusalem. Among whom, we know from Acts, were Mary and other wives and widows and young women.

Many pastors will struggle tomorrow with how to properly balance the observance of this major feast of the Christian calendar with a high holy day of cultural celebration, complete with cards and flowers and the biggest day for eating out of the entire year (Waitresses Day, anyone?).

What most congregational leaders know is that women, and especially mothers & grandmothers, are the very backbone of most churches. Any student of church history knows that in Antioch and Edessa, from Constantinople to Copenhagen, whether Katerina von Bora or Susanna Wesley, mothers have been the rock on which much of the church we know today was founded.

In this past week I had the sad pleasure of attending a funeral for Betsy O’Neill, of whom it may almost be said that she “gave birth” to the parish of St. Edward the Confessor Catholic Church. As a mother in her own family, and for many beyond her immediate circle of relations, she mothered and loved and cared for a community that made God’s love visible. Without Betsy, there would likely have been a St. Ed’s someday, under some name, of some sort, but it would not be the vibrant parish you pass in Granville today.

She grew up Methodist, and on learning my own affiliation, she told me with great glee some years ago a story, told again for her at the memorial service by Father Paul, of how the Granville Inn’s Sally Jones Sexton threatened to sell out to a convent of Catholic nuns -- if she didn’t get a liquor license.

So good Methodists like young Betsy and her mother marched out on the streets, petitions in hand, to stave off the dread prospect of nuns in Granville, even if it meant the arrival of Demon Rum. She had 61 years of happy marriage to her Jack as a faithful Catholic to balance out those signatures she gathered years before, so she laughed.

That is the laughter that the Devil runs away from, the good cheer which helps build the Kingdom of Heaven, the rock on which the Church of Christ is built. Mother’s Day and Pentecost will coexist very nicely, as signs of the Spirit of God which gives life to the world and points us all to the life eternal to come.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-11-08
Jeff Gill

Making Do and Making Last

The Lovely Wife and I usually go for the proposition that paying a bit more for quality adds up to frugal in the long run.

Buying something that’s half the price which lasts a third as long means you replace it faster, unless the cost consideration makes you realize you don’t need the item in the first place (hence the other household principle of not buying something, anything, on sight).

Clothing gets to be an interesting challenge in this category. Like the “sawdust in the transmission” trick of olde tymes used car salesmen, they’ve gotten good at masking poor stichery and inferior materials until you’ve had the item for long enough that you don’t feel like looking for the receipt and going back to wait in line at (Ha!) “Customer Service.”

Kids’ clothing is the real puzzle, because you’re not buying for the ages, anyhow. I’m delighted to own jackets and shoes with decades of wear in them, since I dress in a fairly neutral (read: dull) style (read: none) that doesn’t go out of style because it wasn’t ever all that much in style. So twenty year old jackets work for me, and buying something twice as expensive as the one that would open up across the seams in eighteen months is a good purchase.

For the Little Guy’s stuff, you know that he will outgrow it in a month or a season or at least a year. You could say that we should go easy on the Earth by getting the better quality stuff and handing it along to other families, but that doesn’t always come to mind when you’re looking for a pair of pants that isn’t blown out at the knees RIGHT NOW.

Equally, we keep messing up on the accessory department, like school backpacks. The lure of Buzz Lightyear or Spider-Man draws us into the shelves of . . . well, junk. Piping that peels off in a week, mesh than snags and tears like tissue paper, and odd inner seam chunks of left over material that endlessly spin off threads and bits to hook on notebook spirals and dump out on the kitchen table or living room carpet.

Next year, no major store or theme branded backpack, we say. Sensible, durable, rugged (pricey) bookbag or satchel is the way to go – until the Little Guy sees a brightly colored logo of some sort, and the negotiating begins.

“Planned obsolescence” first hit the national consciousness in 1960, when Vance Packard, author of “The Hidden Persuaders,” wrote “The Waste Makers,” explaining how manufacturers no longer had a business interest in making lasting, durable goods.

In fact, Packard could document how the retail industry did research and development in how to make things that would have a useable life just long enough for us to tolerate it, and then break down, wear out, or become useless at just the right time for us to buy a new one.

Add to that functional obsolescence something called design obsolescence, which is the mysterious art of making something wear out in your mind – it’s out of date, looks old, isn’t cool anymore.

Packard wrote about “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals.” They’re still doing good work in this department almost 50 years later. Meanwhile, finding stuff that is effective and durable is like going on a mastodon hunt.

For all the mothers who search the shelves and dig through catalogs and hunt the wild internet to seek the right item that serves your kids’ needs while not wasting the Earth’s resources, a Mother’s Day salute to you.

Keep on stalking and trading and swapping and bartering, O maternal hunters and gatherers! Your family and your planet will appreciate it, in time.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s not a mother, but has one and is married to another. Tell him your hunt for the perfect pair of shoes for your children at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-3-08
Jeff Gill

Accidental Pilgrimages

There’s an interesting feeling you get when you’re telling a story you’ve told a bunch of times, and the punch line gets a rollicking outburst . . . from half the group.

Then you watch and listen as the translator builds to a crescendo of Espanol, followed by . . . laughter, and smiles.

Whew.

Earlier this week, when the Aztec Dancers of the Word of the Holy Child Teopiltzintecuhtli troupe arrived at the Great Circle with their translator, I wished again that I’d taken Spanish instead of German in high school and college. Oh, well. The Latin years helped me follow more than I’d even hoped (“porta” for door, “ala” for wing, “et cetera” for etc.).

They will be dancing and singing this evening at the dedication of the Great Circle Museum, which I’m very proud to have played a role in developing, under the skillful direction and thoughtful composition of Brad Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society (he has good penmanship, too).

6:00 pm folks will gather there off of Rt. 79 or the 21st St. side, coming down from the Reese Center at OSU-N where we’ll have spent a day hearing talks and discussion about the role of globally significant sites like Stonehenge, the Mexican Pyramids where the Aztec Dancers are from, and the Newark Earthworks.

But I was thinking about a tall cross I’d stopped at just a few days before, on a road that was once the Santa Fe Trail. I was heading for a retreat center and 35 congregational leaders in the Church of the Brethren, where knowing German came in handy, if only for a few small jokes. The descendants of Saxon and Bavarian Anabaptists came to settle the high plains, and brought the traditions of Menno Simons and Jacob Amman and the Pietism of Philip Spener which all play a role in the modern Church of the Brethren tradition.

Driving towards Great Bend, I pulled over at this twenty foot tall cross and a historical marker (I do that occasionally, which means usually). The cross has the letters “IC – XP – NI – KA” on the center of the arms, very like those on First Presbyterian in Granville, so I knew even before reading the plaque at the base that this was an ancient abbreviation for “Jesus Christ, Victor.”

The spot marks where the Coronado Expedition of 1541 spent a season with the Quivira Indians (later known as the Kansa, hence the state’s name) before turning back to Mexico. Not a typo – 1541. Hispanic culture in America has deep roots.

There’s also a marker for Cow Creek Station, where I later learned the “real” Buffalo Bill (last name Mathewson) plied his trade, shooting buffalo and defending parties of settlers.

In Great Bend and Ellinwood, Kansas you can find the stray cornerstone with German inscriptions. And there are more Mexican grocery stores every day. Tides of immigration ebb and flow, and faith traditions come and develop.

German heritage doesn’t tend to erect tall crosses, but down near Greensburg, Kansas, where a terrible tornado hit a year ago, destroying the town but creating a strange new opportunity, pioneer farmers built the world’s largest hand dug well (Google it; it’s cooler than you think). Each tradition leaves it’s own mark on the land, even a 1,200 foot diameter circle in soil and sod.

So I’m back here in Licking County, with these songs and scenes rattling around in my head of priests offering a mass over four centuries ago, pioneer cemeteries, Dominican convents with beautiful stained glass and bearded lay pastors singing “Shall We Gather At the River” in the basement auditorium. All as feathered and jangling dancers prepare to offer their songs of praise to a Child who brought relief to the thirsty and light to our darkness.

And tomorrow and next week I get to preach at Central Christian in Newark because their pastor and many members are in Kansas, working with church folks from many traditions and many states to rebuild the wounded community of Greensburg, with sustainable and energy-efficient means, helping them truly become “Green”-sburg.

Jesus said “the Kingdom of God is within you,” and all around you at the same time . . . if you follow it, you will be brought back to yourself, and see where you were anew.

Kind of like dancing around the Great Circle.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s delighted to be back at Central Christian for two weeks to preach about prayer! Tell him where your journey took you back to yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-4-08
Jeff Gill

Sometimes You Just Say “I Don’t Know”

We had a power outage at Sycamore Lodge recently, and I was delighted to be able to fall back directly on battery clocks strategically placed, flashlights, ditto, and candles were ready to augment had we gone past sunset.

What I realized we didn’t have in place was a good general purpose radio on battery power. All our battery operated radios right now are little earbud widgets, which you can’t set up on the kitchen counter while figuring out breakfast on an electricity-free morning.

Thanks to Pandora on the internet, my radio habit anymore is in the car or online, and the broadband router needs power, even with the laptop batteries at full charge.

So I thought I knew we were set for a power outage, and having one reminded me of how much I don’t know, but just assume.

Life’s full of stuff like that, and some of it just doesn’t bear looking at – but we should. Peering intently at the limits of our knowledge shouldn’t promote know-nothing-ism, but it does offer a leavening dose of humility.

Electricity, for instance. Ben Franklin started to figure out how this natural phenomenon worked with Leyden jars (a primitive storage battery) and a silken cord on his kite. How does today’s electrical system work, sending the energy from turning turbines out of coal-burning boilers down the high tension wires to the neighborhood grid to my toaster?

Having lots of electrical engineering students on my hallway at Purdue University, I learned the disturbing fact that we don’t actually know how power transmission works. Hey, we know that it does – Charles Steinmetz, a figure from GE’s earliest history worth looking up, did a Ben Franklin II with lightning strikes in his summer cottage – and engineers have carefully mapped and charted what happens, even if we can’t quite explain how it does what we observe it doing.

So we set up a kind of watershed dynamic with powerlines and outlets and inputs, but sometimes it does stuff that we can only guess at for causes and reasons. The power flows, usually, mostly, and for now that’s good enough.

That coal we burn to make much of our power? Thanks to fossils in the coal beds and those adjoining the seams of anthracite and bituminous, geologists have a very good idea how coal is formed from (largely) the pollen of ancient primitive plants, best represented today by horse-tail, also known as pot-scrubber plant to Boy Scouts, in roadside ditches (equisetum to the scientists).

But oil? There are some very interesting theories out there, and which one is correct will help to predict exactly how much more petroleum we can expect to find and recover, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t know what crude oil is made from or how it’s formed. Which hasn’t kept us from building a global economy on the stuff.

Nor has the problem of flight kept us from building an amazing air traffic network and sophisticated baggage retrieval systems (in this usage, retrieval means “Ha!”). Every school child knows that, according to the principles of physics, bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly.

It’s worse than that.

You know the picture you learned in school, of a wing cross-section, with lift and airflow and all that explaining why a plane lifts off the ground in take-off and stays aloft? It’s a useful fiction, but it actually doesn’t work in mathematical models, either. That’s not why planes do, in fact, fly. Aeronautical engineers continue to pursue a theory that will add up to enough lift and momentum for a plane to fly – even as they still do.

Are fundamental bits of reality waves, or particles? It depends, and the answer seems to be both, anyhow. Fine. And while evolution has marvelous explanatory and predictive power in the natural world, allowing us to treat illness and make drugs and breed cute little ponies and make sense of this interconnected world, it doesn’t even touch the question of where organic life came from.

The whole “lightning bolts in organic soup” thing many folks think they know and believe is part of evolutionary theory got tossed long ago, and the question is still very much in play, if you’re thinking of topics for an organic chemistry PhD.

And what came before the Big Bang? Even Steven Hawking doesn’t have a guess. Where do all the batteries disappear to in my house? I haven’t a clue. There’s much we just don’t know.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you don’t know at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-26-08
Jeff Gill

Blossoms Above and Before Open Up Right Now

Eternal springtime may be some people’s idea of heaven, but if your sinuses have strong opinions about pollen, not so much.

The peak of tree pollen, with grass pollen numbers swinging up as the arboreal count eases down, starts a grim season for a few (many?) of us.

Which doesn’t mean that even allergy-prone individuals can’t appreciate the beauty of flowering trees. The good news for my nose is what makes them so remarkable: their brief span of blossoming. Dogwood to redbud to forsythia (ok, the last is a shrub) splash their whites and pinks and yellows, then fade from the scene.

Right now we have lilac trees and crabapples and ornamental pears, plus the frilled luminosity of cherry blossoms. What they don’t bring to our scenery is any sense of permanence, with a carpet of petals around the trunk showing up almost as soon as the flowers appear.

There are magnolias I watch for each spring who seem to have lost over half their petals before I see them opened up the next day, and if a stiff wind or hard rain come at the right moment, the soft color could be a purely ground level phenomenon.

This year has been a good slow steady season for these otherwise shortlived displays. The hillsides and river valleys around central Ohio are fuzzing up with buds and new leaves while the splashes and swaths of blossoming trees are maintaining the contrast over weeks, not just days.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, the signs of new life are quite sensisbly attached to imagery of spring blossoms, which are often woody plants given the rugged landscape. Olive and almond usher in the spring as Ecclesiastes notes, then the terebinths Abram and Sarai camped under with their turpentine scented flowers – three times in Genesis we read about the terebinth marking a good place to camp for a nomadic family. Figs and pomegranates have tough but bright blossoms, and the blossom of the grapevine is not on a tree, but is as short lived while still a crucial sign of the season’s decisive turn.

New life is fragile, and trusting the steady progression of the seasons is both certain and terrifying – if you are feeding your family with the bounty of the earth, you learn that summer surely follows spring, but nothing says there won’t be snows after the almond flowers (like our forsythia myths in the New World).

Ask a farmer about how planting’s gone this year . . . never mind, because you won’t find them unless you go out into the field and flag their tractor down. And they may not slow down for you, because they’ve been wanting to get out into the fields for weeks and couldn’t.

So certainly and insecurity, fragility and the foundation of life itself, all resting in the heart of a flower. Georgia O’Keefe spent the latter half of her career painting larger and larger versions of smaller and smaller flowers, like the spring beautys that pop up now on any older, established lawn before the mowers and sprayers do their busy work. The desert flower paintings looked into the hidden secrets on full display if you would stop and look, which O’Keefe tried to help you do by blowing them up to the size of a wall.

Midwestern flowering trees do much the same for us if we let them. The last major florescence around here is that of the tulip poplar, a few weeks from now. 80, 90, over 100 feet above our heads, atop the branchless trunks in their spreading canopies, green spikes are slowly opening up.

Occasionally a squirrel will knock down one of these half-opened orange and yellow flowers, and you kick it idly aside on the path thinking, as you look around on the ground, where are those growing?

In their full glory, pretty much no one sees them, open to the sky above and the bees and butterflies and birds skipping along the upper reaches of the forest. A steady rain follows of petals and a faint scent of cucumber, scattering across the forest as they fall from the heights where they grew.

Some of the greatest beauties of this world appear just beyond our sight, and we can only pick up the hints by watching the ground for what is happening above.

Sounds like something out of the Psalms, doesn’t it?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he hopes to see you all under the tall trees of the Great Circle next Saturday for the new museum dedication at 6:00 pm on May 3 – see www.octagonmoonrise.org for info under “agenda.”

Notes From My Knapsack 4-27-08
Jeff Gill

Layered History, Lightly Worn

If you make it out to the Great Circle earthwork on Saturday, May 3, make sure to check out the trees.

Jim Kingery is proud of those trees, almost none of which he’s planted and a number he’s had to gently take down, like the blue ash that crumpled near the Great Gateway a few months back in a windstorm.

With years of experience as a forester and with the Ohio Historical Society, he’s gotten to know all the vast, ancient trees within and without the enclosure and more recent plantings that go back to Idlewild Park before the 1920s and the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and then the period of OHS stewardship.

Some ask whether we should cut down all the trees to recover a bit of the sense of what was there in a “pocket prairie” 2,000 years ago when the Newark Earthworks were laid out, but that neglects the fact that they buffer the sound of Rt. 79 and Mathews Ford and 21st St., not to mention the visual buffer as well.

And a recent lecture at OSU-N by Lindsay Jones on the “revalorization” of Mexican ancient sites reminded many of us here in Licking County that many years pull many layers of meaning and use and purpose across a landscape, and to decide which layer or approach is “the” right one is tricky, and unlikely to work for the stakeholders however defined for today. “Revalorization” is a handy academic word for reuse, with a twist.

If subjects like that, or how even older sites like England’s Stonehenge has weathered multiple uses and interpretations and abuses, are of interest to you, then the day of May 3 is filled with speakers in the Reese Center on the OSU-N campus – check www.octagonmoonrise.org for details under “agenda.”

Jim is likely to miss most of our speakers, because he and Susan Fryer, director of the Licking County Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, will be getting ready to greet us along with the Aztec Dancers of Queretaro, Mexico for the 6:00 pm dedication ceremonies for the newly refurbished museum for the Newark Earthworks.

And one of those layers for the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks State Memorial is the fact that the best cluster of truly old trees in the county, maybe even the state, is in and around this spot, which was set aside for our county fairground, as a Civil War training camp, and for the myriad peculiar uses of the 20th century to follow. It became an ad hoc preserve, so 300-plus year old trees were left to stand, likely more for shade over the buggies and applecarts than for any sense at the time of conservationism.

The owls of the neighborhood are the direct result of these aged, ancient trees, which naturally have some hollow cavities set large and high up, some from lightning strikes and others from long-ago fungus that wormed its way within and then fell away, leaving some prime real estate for nocturnal hunters of the air.

There are red oaks and white oaks that are older than Ohio, older than this nation, some that may have been a newly sprouting acorn when the Jamestown settlers first stumbled ashore in Virginia or Juan de Onate planted a cross in New Mexico.

Then on Sunday, May 4, you have a chance to roam the Octagon portion of the Newark Earthworks up off of 33rd St. and Parkview west of Cherry Valley School that was and is. The beech trees on the southern third of that site are broader at the base, but as Jim has taught me, younger, and doomed to an earlier death, both by their shorter lifespan, softer wood, and the general stress on trees today that’s more than it was in 1708.

Whether you have an interest in heritage and history, sacred sites or archaeological study, native dancers or academic lecturers, make sure to look into and around and up through the trees of these parks, and let them anchor a bit of your imaginings. They’re not as old as the mounds, but they’re older than you! Show a little respect, and feel a little awe in return.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is delighted to moderate some of the sessions at Newark Earthworks Day on May 3 (see www.octagonmoonrise.org). Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-19-08
Jeff Gill

Presidential Piety Under Scrutiny

One way or another the religious views of Presidential candidates play a role in election season, if not during their tenure in office.

Most of the country now knows that Barack Obama attends Trinity United Church of Christ when he’s at home on the South Side of Chicago. Whether they know that the UCC denomination is the heir of the tradition that brought the Pilgrims to Massachusetts Bay is more up for grabs.

Jeremiah Wright is more colorful than most UCC pastors I know, but he also fits into a tradition that defended the escaped slaves of the Amistad, supported the abolition movement more than any other denomination before the Civil War, and has long promoted progressive political causes.

Hillary Rodham grew up a Methodist, and when she married a Southern Baptist, Bill Clinton didn’t convert officially, but their attendance and her membership has been in United Methodist congregations, in Washington and up in New York State. Her youth minister growing up in a Chicago suburb took the group to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. preach, and that marked a pivotal moment in her taking both faith and public life very seriously.

John McCain comes from a family with a long heritage in the U.S. Navy (three generations, but he has a son who enlisted in the Marines who just returned from Iraq – Ooh-rah). He probably grew up hearing more non-denominational chaplains’ sermons, but was baptized and confirmed in The Episcopal Church. His second wife Cindy is Baptist, and they attend together there when in Arizona, but he has not transferred his membership into that congregation.

The last election was shaping up in some interesting ways because John Kerry was sort of the odd man out – a Catholic by upbringing and occasional attendance later in life (he had not “registered” with any local parish leading up to the 2004 election, but sometimes attended a campus ministry where Mass was offered by a priest).

But John Edwards is United Methodist, George W. Bush is Methodist, and contrary to all my friends and acquaintances who insist that Dick Cheney is a member of the Church of Eating Babies With Mustard For Lunch, he and Lynne are, in fact . . . Methodist.

George H. W. Bush is named for his mother’s family, the Walkers (where the whole Kennebunkport thing comes from, at Walker’s Point in Maine), and his mother’s favorite poet, the Anglican priest George Herbert. Accordingly, George and Barbara are Episcopalian, but their children have traveled in a variety of directions, with Jeb becoming a Catholic on marrying his wife Columba.

George W. and Laura attend an Episcopal church that is within a block of the White House when in Washington, which is appropriate given that John Wesley lived out his days as an Anglican priest, and hoped to promote a Reformation within the Church of England, not start a new denomination. Francis Asbury in this country had a different view, but the United Methodist Church still shares quite a few qualities and characteristics with The Episcopal Church.

Ron Paul is still running, and he considered becoming a Lutheran pastor (which a brother did, in fact do), but decided on med school at Gettysburg College, where he met and married his wife who was Episcopalian. Their children were all baptized into that tradition, but the Pauls now attend a Baptist church when in Texas.

Ralph Nader, who speaks Arabic fluently from his parents’ heritage out of Lebanon, is Maronite Catholic. If elected, he would be the first Maronite, or Eastern rite Catholic, to hold the office. Mike Gravel (yes, he’s still running) is Unitarian Universalist – but he wouldn’t be the first in the unlikely chance that he’d win.

He’d be the fourth, following John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and William Howard Taft.

Oh, and Pope Benedict XVI, who visited the White House this week? He’s Catholic.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s ordained Disciples of Christ, but speaks fluent Methodist, passable UCC, and broken but understandable Lutheran. Tell him your religious dialects at knapsack77@gmail.com.