Notes from my Knapsack — draft September column
Jeff Gill
Why Gillfish can't vote for Donald Trump
___
[Note for editor: the firm policy, I had heard for years, was that columnists do not do endorsements on any level, federal or local, and I've hewed to that line since beginning my run in the Booster/Sentinel in 2003. Since my erstwhile counterpart made a clear endorsement last week, I've heard from some of my readers asking if I'm making a similar statement. If I were, it would read something like the following…]
With the coveted if reluctant endorsement of my fellow columnist, Don Haven, for Donald Trump in the presidential race, it may be pointless for me to offer my own take on the balloting (early voting starts Oct. 8).
In fact, Brother Haven in detail offers some qualifications on his endorsement with which I'm in full agreement. Still, I have a less than policy related set of reasons for not being able to echo his affirmation. In fact, I have a largely unitary reason for not supporting the former president for a second, non-sequential term, even if it makes for a fun historical asterisk alongside Grover Cleveland.
I dislike intensely his preference for making fun of people's names.
Go ahead, call that a terrible reason for not voting for someone. You might well be right. In fairness to myself, I've been reconciled to not much liking the candidates on offer for much of my voting life: my first campaign as a volunteer worker was for John B. Anderson, and if you don't recall the man from Illinois, that's okay. He was a [whispers] third-party candidate.
But I am quite serious that I cannot support a person for Chief Magistrate of These United States who has so consistently and persistently used mockery of names and physical qualities as his preferred campaign strategy.
In a wider sense, I can appeal to my decades of work in and among youth, and say emphatically that making fun of another person's name or looks is a major challenge in getting young people to have healthy relationships with each other. A tendency to make fun of those around you is the sign of a bully empowered, and when mocking nicknames are normal out loud interactions, you can count on other abusive patterns showing up right behind. In other words, I've worked for years to get youth to be more respectful to each other, kinder and more caring, and there are times I hear the evening news and the sound of that work going down the drain is almost audible. Why would I want to support more of that in public life?
In my elementary years, I picked up a pair of glasses, and a nickname. Two, actually. I hated both, but Gillfish was worse, and of course what I heard all the time. Bookworm was almost inevitable.
Then I got to junior high, and my first English class with Mr. Fred Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was a legendary basketball coach, but that day he was simply the teacher, and he called the roll, and got to me. "Jeffrey Gill. What are you usually called?" I suspect he expected the reply "Jeff." What I said reflexively was "Gillfish or Bookworm, I answer to either."
He looked up. His brow furrowed. "What do YOU want to be called?"
I actually had to think for a minute. "Um, Jeff is good."
"Well, then," Mr. Mitchell said, "in this classroom, in this building, in my earshot, you will be Jeff. Thank you." And in fact, I don't think I heard Gillfish at school ever again. Anywhere. By that one teacher, his one statement, that first day, it ended.
That's why I can't vote for Donald Trump. A small reason, but for me it's enough. We don't need more mocking name calling, but we could use a few more Fred Mitchells. He just turned 84, and I bless his memory.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's grown philosophical about his old nicknames, up to a point. Tell him what you used to be called at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Faith Works 8-23-24
Faith Works 8-23-24
Jeff Gill
Why should I attend a worship service?
___
Summer is, I hate to tell you, coming to an end.
You can define it as to astronomical phenomena, or by the academic calendar as most do; if you want to insist summer isn't over until Labor Day evening, feel free!
Christmas is less than 125 days away, too.
With the end of summer and the season of vacations, it's time to address a recurring subject in this column. Why go to church (on Sunday)?
As a teacher of church history, I've had reason to do a little digging on the development of multiple services, something that was relatively rare outside of big city congregations until the Seventies.
The "worship wars" era ended in many locations with an uneasy detente, still on display in a number of churches, between so-called contemporary worship and traditional style services, obviously resulting in at least two services.
Seeker-sensitive church plants, which heralded the explosion of non-denominational congregations (and a fair number of denominational plants which worked hard to appear non-denim), almost always held contemporary worship style services, but they liked to offer multiple services to provide options. Remember, they're seeker sensitive. So you would have two or three Sunday morning, often a Sunday evening service, and increasingly a Saturday night offering.
This was, I suspect, a reaction to the development after the Second Vatican Council among U.S. Catholics to have what are sometimes called "vigil masses," aka Saturday night mass, which might happen well before dusk. There's a fascinating history to how this response grew out of a European preference for Sunday evening masses, which opened the door for a service "after sunset" on Saturday night, as counting for Sunday observance. The liturgical tradition was that the Sabbath began the evening before, so you could have an anticipatory worship Saturday "night" which was liturgically Sunday. The Vatican gave American Catholics formal clearance to do so through the Seventies, and it became a global norm in the early Eighties.
All of which meant by the time I got into parish ministry in the mid-Eighties, even smaller Protestant churches felt a fair amount of pressure to have at least two services, and medium sized ones could have Saturday night worship and three on Sunday.
(There's something to recall historically about how this hearkens back to our colonial Puritan history, echoing down into holiness influenced worship on the early frontier, where many churches held a morning service, ate Sunday dinner then returned for an afternoon service, and sometimes even an evening prayer meeting on top of all that, along with midweek worship often on a Wednesday night.)
COVID triggered what I think was a long impending re-set around worship services. Every time I talk about this online a number of people will jump in to say "my church has grown immensely since COVID!" but the wider picture is clear: church attendance has not bounced back. In Ohio, at any rate, the claim "it's because the government shut down churches" is not correct: there were recommendations and guidance offered, but no mandate to close (other states did so).
What each congregation had to struggle with was how to protect worshipers (especially elderly ones), especially during the peak periods of infection. There were changes begun during COVID that have lasted, including reductions on things being passed around like offering plates or attendance registers, and how communion was done. Changes around distribution of the bread and the cup have tended to last, even as the plethora of hand-sanitizer bottles have slowly dwindled to a few.
Meanwhile, lots of people stopped coming, and haven't started back yet. What are we to make of it, and how to talk about that change?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he fills the pulpit in a variety of church types these days, and has more to say on attendance. Tell him why you go, or don't, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Why should I attend a worship service?
___
Summer is, I hate to tell you, coming to an end.
You can define it as to astronomical phenomena, or by the academic calendar as most do; if you want to insist summer isn't over until Labor Day evening, feel free!
Christmas is less than 125 days away, too.
With the end of summer and the season of vacations, it's time to address a recurring subject in this column. Why go to church (on Sunday)?
As a teacher of church history, I've had reason to do a little digging on the development of multiple services, something that was relatively rare outside of big city congregations until the Seventies.
The "worship wars" era ended in many locations with an uneasy detente, still on display in a number of churches, between so-called contemporary worship and traditional style services, obviously resulting in at least two services.
Seeker-sensitive church plants, which heralded the explosion of non-denominational congregations (and a fair number of denominational plants which worked hard to appear non-denim), almost always held contemporary worship style services, but they liked to offer multiple services to provide options. Remember, they're seeker sensitive. So you would have two or three Sunday morning, often a Sunday evening service, and increasingly a Saturday night offering.
This was, I suspect, a reaction to the development after the Second Vatican Council among U.S. Catholics to have what are sometimes called "vigil masses," aka Saturday night mass, which might happen well before dusk. There's a fascinating history to how this response grew out of a European preference for Sunday evening masses, which opened the door for a service "after sunset" on Saturday night, as counting for Sunday observance. The liturgical tradition was that the Sabbath began the evening before, so you could have an anticipatory worship Saturday "night" which was liturgically Sunday. The Vatican gave American Catholics formal clearance to do so through the Seventies, and it became a global norm in the early Eighties.
All of which meant by the time I got into parish ministry in the mid-Eighties, even smaller Protestant churches felt a fair amount of pressure to have at least two services, and medium sized ones could have Saturday night worship and three on Sunday.
(There's something to recall historically about how this hearkens back to our colonial Puritan history, echoing down into holiness influenced worship on the early frontier, where many churches held a morning service, ate Sunday dinner then returned for an afternoon service, and sometimes even an evening prayer meeting on top of all that, along with midweek worship often on a Wednesday night.)
COVID triggered what I think was a long impending re-set around worship services. Every time I talk about this online a number of people will jump in to say "my church has grown immensely since COVID!" but the wider picture is clear: church attendance has not bounced back. In Ohio, at any rate, the claim "it's because the government shut down churches" is not correct: there were recommendations and guidance offered, but no mandate to close (other states did so).
What each congregation had to struggle with was how to protect worshipers (especially elderly ones), especially during the peak periods of infection. There were changes begun during COVID that have lasted, including reductions on things being passed around like offering plates or attendance registers, and how communion was done. Changes around distribution of the bread and the cup have tended to last, even as the plethora of hand-sanitizer bottles have slowly dwindled to a few.
Meanwhile, lots of people stopped coming, and haven't started back yet. What are we to make of it, and how to talk about that change?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he fills the pulpit in a variety of church types these days, and has more to say on attendance. Tell him why you go, or don't, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-24
Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-24
Jeff Gill
It's all debatable
___
Presidential debates have perhaps never been more important in U.S. politics than they have been this year.
Presidential debates have perhaps never been more important in U.S. politics than they have been this year.
Arguably a poor debate performance drove incumbent Joe Biden out of the running for the Nov. 5 general election (Ohio early voting starts Oct. 8). So there's an extra dollop of attention on how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris do versus each other in however many debates they end up having.
Historically, debates really haven't done that much. It is often argued the original TV debate, Richard Nixon versus John F. Kennedy in 1960, had an impact on the election's outcome. The usual claim is those who heard it on the radio thought Nixon won, but if you had your TV on, you thought Kennedy did. (Spoiler alert: Kennedy won.)
Gerald Ford stumbled against Jimmy Carter over how he described Poland's status behind the Iron Curtain, reinforcing an existing downward trend on his polling; Ronald Reagan got off a good line about his opponent's relative youth and immaturity, delivered so well even Walter Mondale laughed uproariously. Did either turn of phrase really deliver the election?
Sometimes people are surprised to hear we've only had presidential debates since 1960. "What about the Lincoln-Douglas debates?" Um, well: that was 1858, but it was for the Senate campaign in Illinois, and Douglas won. It did set the table, though, for the 1860 presidential race. (Spoiler again: Lincoln won that time.)
There's a famous management adage from Edward Deming: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." I think of that when I watch today's presidential debate format, versus the one that gave us Abraham Lincoln as President.
Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had seven debates through the summer and fall of 1858, in different communities all around Illinois. They were held from 2:00 pm to about 5:00 pm. The two took turns starting, and the first debater spoke for (are you sitting down?) an hour, the response had ninety minutes for the second candidate, then the opening speaker had a half-hour to respond.
Shorthand and telegraphy were technologies just becoming widespread, and through them, the debates did become a national phenomenon, with large chunks of the debate speeches being reprinted all across the United States.
But I just think about the vast difference between asking someone to set forward their program across an uninterrupted hour, knowing their opponent was about to have an hour and a half to reply to your proposals. Then thinking as they spoke about how to use your thirty minute reply. As opposed to "you have thirty seconds to reply."
If every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, then what are we getting from a program of short sound bites and fragmentary replies? Does a short attention span format tend to give us a more distracted and digressive candidate? Or does it just favor that sort of mindset…
(Deming also said "A bad system will beat a good person every time." Spoiler?)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in debates before and isn't sure our presidential debate format deserves the label. Debate that question with him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Faith Works 8-16-24
Faith Works 8-16-24
Jeff Gill
Bearing one another's burdens
___
Following some recent discussion of what makes us uncomfortable or even indignant as people of faith in a complicated culture, let alone a fallen world, I was reading last week in an online periodical aimed largely at a Catholic audience, but with implications I believe much more broadly applicable.
It was a post in "The Lamp," Issue 24, which calls itself "A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc." What caught my attention was an essay titled "Are All Welcome?" with the subtitle: "On attending Mass with special needs children."
The author, Kevin Tierney, is from Toledo, Ohio, so just up the road, both geographically and culturally. His family includes two special needs children, both with autism and having different degrees of outward symptoms, including something called "stimming" which can seem like noisemaking to someone not used to the situation, but is a largely involuntary response to changes in the environment. It can range from grunts and groans to seemingly nonsense verbalization, and the kind of thing that makes many people think "they should just stop it."
Tierney tries with great patience and charity to help the reader understand what it's like to be a parent with a child having such a diagnosis, and trying to attend worship. As I hope you know, the main point is that you can't "just stop it." Trying to force a child in such a situation to "stop it" is more likely to increase the outward vocalizations and expressions.
His point, which is where I think almost any faith community can stop and ask itself some questions, is around how children like this call the whole community to reflect on what constitutes "normal" behavior. Is silence, and attentiveness, and a reflective focus on what it going on in the service, the most important part of being in community? Are sounds and disruptions the worst thing that can happen, and enough so that it should result in a general wish for those who can't follow the community norms to leave the gathering space?
Or is the value of being together in community reason enough for us to reflect together on how we can gather everyone, even when some of the gathered community are not able to follow the norms of what we're used to thinking of as "normal" group behavior? Could we learn to accept a certain amount of difference across the assembly, and lift up our wholeness as the higher value, over deportment and decorum?
As Tierney asks: "Each member of the community must be willing to embrace being inconvenienced for the sake of the Gospel and its mission. I do not mean this in the clichéd sense of "offering it up." I mean this in the sense of being actively willing to bear the struggles of others. Maybe this involves training yourself not to shoot a glare backwards in the Church at someone who is loud or disruptive. Maybe it involves going over to a stressed parent and asking whether there's anything you can do to help."
If you are at a live performance or watching a movie where you've paid a steep admission price to see and hear the production, I get how there's an expectation to leave the room if you're making it hard for other patrons to get what they paid for. But is worship that sort of consumer experience? Is it necessary to enforce norms of behavior for everyone to get what they came for? It's a question, and I admit not with a simple, easy answer.
Tierney agrees, and as he closes his piece says "I do not write this to condemn. I don't want to offer a five-year plan to fix the Church. I want this to be an examination of conscience."
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows what it's like to seek peace and quiet, too. Tell him how you see this issue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Note for editors: https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/are-all-welcome
Jeff Gill
Bearing one another's burdens
___
Following some recent discussion of what makes us uncomfortable or even indignant as people of faith in a complicated culture, let alone a fallen world, I was reading last week in an online periodical aimed largely at a Catholic audience, but with implications I believe much more broadly applicable.
It was a post in "The Lamp," Issue 24, which calls itself "A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc." What caught my attention was an essay titled "Are All Welcome?" with the subtitle: "On attending Mass with special needs children."
The author, Kevin Tierney, is from Toledo, Ohio, so just up the road, both geographically and culturally. His family includes two special needs children, both with autism and having different degrees of outward symptoms, including something called "stimming" which can seem like noisemaking to someone not used to the situation, but is a largely involuntary response to changes in the environment. It can range from grunts and groans to seemingly nonsense verbalization, and the kind of thing that makes many people think "they should just stop it."
Tierney tries with great patience and charity to help the reader understand what it's like to be a parent with a child having such a diagnosis, and trying to attend worship. As I hope you know, the main point is that you can't "just stop it." Trying to force a child in such a situation to "stop it" is more likely to increase the outward vocalizations and expressions.
His point, which is where I think almost any faith community can stop and ask itself some questions, is around how children like this call the whole community to reflect on what constitutes "normal" behavior. Is silence, and attentiveness, and a reflective focus on what it going on in the service, the most important part of being in community? Are sounds and disruptions the worst thing that can happen, and enough so that it should result in a general wish for those who can't follow the community norms to leave the gathering space?
Or is the value of being together in community reason enough for us to reflect together on how we can gather everyone, even when some of the gathered community are not able to follow the norms of what we're used to thinking of as "normal" group behavior? Could we learn to accept a certain amount of difference across the assembly, and lift up our wholeness as the higher value, over deportment and decorum?
As Tierney asks: "Each member of the community must be willing to embrace being inconvenienced for the sake of the Gospel and its mission. I do not mean this in the clichéd sense of "offering it up." I mean this in the sense of being actively willing to bear the struggles of others. Maybe this involves training yourself not to shoot a glare backwards in the Church at someone who is loud or disruptive. Maybe it involves going over to a stressed parent and asking whether there's anything you can do to help."
If you are at a live performance or watching a movie where you've paid a steep admission price to see and hear the production, I get how there's an expectation to leave the room if you're making it hard for other patrons to get what they paid for. But is worship that sort of consumer experience? Is it necessary to enforce norms of behavior for everyone to get what they came for? It's a question, and I admit not with a simple, easy answer.
Tierney agrees, and as he closes his piece says "I do not write this to condemn. I don't want to offer a five-year plan to fix the Church. I want this to be an examination of conscience."
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows what it's like to seek peace and quiet, too. Tell him how you see this issue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Note for editors: https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/are-all-welcome
Tuesday, August 06, 2024
Faith Works 8-9-24
Nate or Ben — if this is too long, feel free to delete the next-to-last paragraph!
Pax, Jeff
===
Faith Works 8-9-24
Jeff Gill
Indignation is exhausting, but interest is sustainable
___
Reaction to my expression of discomfort over a billboard exhorting people to "Shack Up" along a major local thoroughfare, overlooking a place large numbers of high schoolers will be gathering soon for football games, was about what I expected.
It was almost all "you're upset about that? Here's something you really should be upset by!" Yep, that's the media environment we live in: pile indignation atop indignation, whereby one's point is made by being the most indignant.
In fact, I never said I was upset or indignant, I noted it was "puzzling" and left me feeling "discomfort," because I "wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general" as to encouraging young environmentally concerned folk to "Shack up." Potayto, potahto one might say, but I'm going to stick to my guns and say I'm not indignant or terribly upset, just asking questions.
Similarly, I got a hatful of questions and comments from a variety of sources about the Olympic opening ceremony controversy. For the record, after the producers, the printed program available in Paris, and the International Olympic Committee all said the scene in question was, in fact, meant as a parody of sorts of "The Last Supper on the Banks of the Seine" the actual focus is really not in question. But I was asked if I was upset by or would condemn it.
Nope. Seriously, this is where Winston Churchill's counsel about such things and barking dogs comes into play (you can look it up). I can think, offhand, of the DaVinci "Last Supper" visual being referenced by "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica," and "Twin Peaks" (at least in promotional materials if not in the shows themselves); the film version of "MASH" famously had a pivotal scene very directly and more than somewhat inappropriately modeled on Jesus and the disciples all sitting on one side of a long table. Some of us suspect the last scenes of "The Sopranos" had an oblique "Last Supper" reference built into one shot from outside the restaurant (IYKYK).
Christianity can take such homages, whether done respectfully or teasingly or even mildly blasphemously. Was it a good idea in the Olympics? I don't think so, and there even was an apology, so to me it's a dead issue and no big deal.
What I find fascinating is that I've read a large number now of critiques of the Olympic opening ceremony from socially conservative viewpoints, and not seen any of them mention what I thought was a bad choice and worthy of an apology.
Not long after the Last Supper morphing into a Dionysian banquet, we had a trio of young people running around in a vast beautiful library, and quick shots of a series of books which were all, shall we say, sexually adventurous. Sigh, I thought, are we really going for that sort of stereotype for France? Oh yes they were.
The extended scene ends with a shredding of even those transgressive books (huh? still don't get that at all, and I don't like tearing up books, whether I like the contents or not), flinging the pages in the air, then running out, up a flight of stairs getting increasingly frisky with each other, then entering an apartment and teasingly closing the door. I don't think it's prudish at all to observe the point of the scene was a) a menage-a-trois, and b) it was not a quick or glancing aside, it was the point of the sequence.
I just think that was an incredibly stupid choice for a global audience with lots of kids watching. Maybe they thought it was late enough in the show kids were in bed, but the torch hadn't even been lit yet. And again, it plays into a silly stereotype about France but hey, I'm just an Ohioan.
But it was fascinating I've heard nary a peep about it in all the "indignation." What did you think?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has questions. Tell him what yours are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Pax, Jeff
===
Faith Works 8-9-24
Jeff Gill
Indignation is exhausting, but interest is sustainable
___
Reaction to my expression of discomfort over a billboard exhorting people to "Shack Up" along a major local thoroughfare, overlooking a place large numbers of high schoolers will be gathering soon for football games, was about what I expected.
It was almost all "you're upset about that? Here's something you really should be upset by!" Yep, that's the media environment we live in: pile indignation atop indignation, whereby one's point is made by being the most indignant.
In fact, I never said I was upset or indignant, I noted it was "puzzling" and left me feeling "discomfort," because I "wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general" as to encouraging young environmentally concerned folk to "Shack up." Potayto, potahto one might say, but I'm going to stick to my guns and say I'm not indignant or terribly upset, just asking questions.
Similarly, I got a hatful of questions and comments from a variety of sources about the Olympic opening ceremony controversy. For the record, after the producers, the printed program available in Paris, and the International Olympic Committee all said the scene in question was, in fact, meant as a parody of sorts of "The Last Supper on the Banks of the Seine" the actual focus is really not in question. But I was asked if I was upset by or would condemn it.
Nope. Seriously, this is where Winston Churchill's counsel about such things and barking dogs comes into play (you can look it up). I can think, offhand, of the DaVinci "Last Supper" visual being referenced by "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica," and "Twin Peaks" (at least in promotional materials if not in the shows themselves); the film version of "MASH" famously had a pivotal scene very directly and more than somewhat inappropriately modeled on Jesus and the disciples all sitting on one side of a long table. Some of us suspect the last scenes of "The Sopranos" had an oblique "Last Supper" reference built into one shot from outside the restaurant (IYKYK).
Christianity can take such homages, whether done respectfully or teasingly or even mildly blasphemously. Was it a good idea in the Olympics? I don't think so, and there even was an apology, so to me it's a dead issue and no big deal.
What I find fascinating is that I've read a large number now of critiques of the Olympic opening ceremony from socially conservative viewpoints, and not seen any of them mention what I thought was a bad choice and worthy of an apology.
Not long after the Last Supper morphing into a Dionysian banquet, we had a trio of young people running around in a vast beautiful library, and quick shots of a series of books which were all, shall we say, sexually adventurous. Sigh, I thought, are we really going for that sort of stereotype for France? Oh yes they were.
The extended scene ends with a shredding of even those transgressive books (huh? still don't get that at all, and I don't like tearing up books, whether I like the contents or not), flinging the pages in the air, then running out, up a flight of stairs getting increasingly frisky with each other, then entering an apartment and teasingly closing the door. I don't think it's prudish at all to observe the point of the scene was a) a menage-a-trois, and b) it was not a quick or glancing aside, it was the point of the sequence.
I just think that was an incredibly stupid choice for a global audience with lots of kids watching. Maybe they thought it was late enough in the show kids were in bed, but the torch hadn't even been lit yet. And again, it plays into a silly stereotype about France but hey, I'm just an Ohioan.
But it was fascinating I've heard nary a peep about it in all the "indignation." What did you think?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has questions. Tell him what yours are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, July 27, 2024
images, if useful
First the newer replacement stone from 1935, now in Old Colony Burying Ground, and a general and close-up view of the older marker now at the Granville Historical Society Museum:
Notes from my Knapsack 8-8-24
Notes from my Knapsack 8-8-24
Jeff Gill
An awkward phrase, a hidden history
___
During the Fourth of July Street Fair (and hurrah to Granville Kiwanis for another wonderful week of community fun) I took a break from the heat and sat on the side porch of the Granville Historical Society, thinking about wording.
During the Fourth of July Street Fair (and hurrah to Granville Kiwanis for another wonderful week of community fun) I took a break from the heat and sat on the side porch of the Granville Historical Society, thinking about wording.
I recently shared some of my research around Patrick Cunningham, a shadowy figure if in bold strokes found in Granville's and Licking County's earliest written history.
He has generally been relegated to a secondary, if poignant role around the Jones family as pioneer settlers here who . . . okay, and this is where wording gets awkward. They are called "the first White family" in Granville Township, and while John and Lillie Jones came here in 1801 with two daughters and a son, their fourth child, named for Lillie's father Jonathan Benjamin Jones, was born Oct. 1, 1802 and is called the "first White child born" in the area as well.
Sadly, Lillie dies just a few weeks later, and with Patrick Cunningham's help, John buries his wife and takes the four children back to the Marietta area, where later he would remarry and live out his life, most of the children growing up to move to Illinois. Neighbor Cunningham is notable as I've already explained for re-locating Lillie's remains not once but twice in deference to her family's wishes.
The third burial site, in Granville's Old Colony Burying Ground, makes her the earliest death but not the first burial there, given her circuitous route from Newark-Granville Road to downtown old Newark and back to Granville after those settlers came in 1805. And the marker on her third grave is in fact the second one there; we don't know what rude monument was placed at her first burial site, and there's a chance the older Granville marker was placed on her brief resting place in Newark, then traveled with her remains to her current location. Whatever the earlier story, sometime after coming to Granville, in the very late 1800s, her marker was stolen. The granite tombstone today was placed in 1935, but using the recorded inscription from the older monument . . . which turned up later, and is now on the side porch of the village museum.
You can dimly trace along the bottom those words, uncomfortable to read today: "This is the 1st White family that ever inhabited Granville Tp." There's an overtone to that choice of words which makes today's reader uneasy.
Yet there's two pieces of information I would pull out of that uncomfortable phrase. There is a certain seeking after pre-eminence in that "1st" (as the older stone has it, "First" in the 1935 replacement), but in saying "1st White" family or birth, there's an implicit acknowledgement that there were people, families, and births here before 1801. It was unambiguously understood that Native Americans, "Red Men" in the racist term of the times, had been here, built, thrived, loved, and died. Until 1830 settler accounts would talk of "Indian visitors" passing through on a regular basis. So the monumentalists knew there were previous inhabitants, hence the queasy precision of "1st White family."
And that second qualifier: if they were the first "family," that makes me wonder. In fact, re-reading the earliest accounts, you can get the impression that 50 year old widower Patrick Cunningham in his solitary cabin was here . . . first. Had built up the slope, a little closer to the spring, and was present to welcome the Jones family, perhaps helping them to build their cabin about 20 rods, or 110 yards further south at the foot of the hill.
I wonder.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's finding Patrick Cunningham a fascinating if elusive quarry. Tell him what keeps you looking for more information at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 8-2-24
Faith Works 8-2-24
Jeff Gill
On taking offense in a constructive fashion
___
There's piety, and there's discipleship.
There's piety, and there's discipleship.
I wouldn't want to say they can't and don't overlap. They often do.
My personal piety runs to practices that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to any person interested in my faith; not all Christians follow the same devotional habits nor would I say they should. You could make a case that, especially in our public faith, any thing we do or say should be at least potentially a recommendation to others, a sort of evangelistic statement in deed and word.
The Apostle Paul famously complicated this question with his statements about marriage, which (at that point in his life, anyhow) he said was not for him, but others might be different. You can look that one up.
In a church I served, we had a program on Bible reading which I supported, adding in an option for listening in your car to your scripture passages on cassette tapes. Someone came to me, sincerely but rather insistently, arguing that this was a mistake: people should read a printed Bible while sitting still, or it didn't count. I pointed out Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch's situation where the latter was reading Isaiah while riding in a chariot, and the reaction was not a happy one to my comparison.
Piety may well be a worn leather-bound King James Version, but discipleship is being well-versed in the Bible, however you access the text. I think we can get general consensus on this.
Piety would include, I'd argue, faithfulness to my word, including my wedding vows; discipleship means extending grace and opening paths into church life for those whose lives may have followed some crooked paths, not always of their choosing. More bluntly, I strongly affirm fidelity in marriage, but I think we've learned that when the church becomes an army that shoots its wounded, and casts off anyone who's been through a divorce as unworthy for membership, let alone leadership, it runs the risk of preaching only to the converted, of being the proverbial "museum for saints, not a hospital for sinners."
I was thinking about this subject because of my recent writings about how faith communities can promote trust, and an intersection with my historical researches venturing into an orphanage effort in my religious tradition in the 1890s. A strong woman in leadership opened up a "foundling hospital" and welcomed abandoned mothers, but was driven out of her role when she refused to bar unmarried mothers from her facility. Married men, of course, were the group that ushered her out the door; she went on to start over and open up a home for mothers in need of all sorts.
My first thought on reading this was "I wonder about those men." It's unfair, perhaps, but I couldn't stop myself from suspecting that not all of those men had been chaste in their singleness or faithful in marriage themselves. Maybe they were. And in wanting to promote marriage and commitment, they took their piety and pushed it over onto how they wanted both discipleship and mission to be practiced, shoving mercy to one side.
More locally, I have been puzzling for months now over a billboard on a major highway, overlooking a field soon to host high school sports, with two toothbrushes in a cup and the oblique legend (on first reading, at least, to the naive) "Conserve energy. Shack up."
The folks behind #TheEnvironmentExcuse want to be clever, certainly not pious, about climate change. To do so they toy with an issue I think is near to my sense of discipleship. I'm not advocating a return to social stigma around cohabitation, but I can't help but wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general, and feel discomfort because it's against the goals I would want our youth to see held up.
What do you think?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on his piety and discipleship every day, with mixed results. Tell him how you'd like to decorate a billboard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on his piety and discipleship every day, with mixed results. Tell him how you'd like to decorate a billboard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
[In case you care . . .
Friday, July 05, 2024
Faith Works 7-26-24
Faith Works 7-26-24
Jeff Gill
Trust as the technology of faith in action
___
Preachers ask people to trust the Bible. What I think we wrestle with as ministers today is how people do find the Bible . . . interesting. I really do believe people feel the pull of ancient texts, timeless traditions, deep truths. The Bible is interesting, and even holy to many people.
What they resist is being told to trust it. And that lack of trust is not so much with whether or not the divine can be channeled through scriptures in a book, but in the human persons interpreting it.
We started this extended meditation with the challenge of technology and apps and connections. Do we walk away from smart phones and tablets and online worship to find a more reliable path to faith in a loving God who is involved in our lives, or can they be used as tools to understand for ourselves and interpret to others what we mean by Heaven, Hell, and "the last things" of eternity?
Where I want to land this series of reflections is exactly here: I don't think it matters. You can go full-on Amish in your relationship to technology, or you can be a highly online internet savvy technophilic believer. It doesn't matter. What does matter given the broad trends in society to day is that question of trust.
Church folk want to communicate to people in general and those seeking truth in particular: you should trust the Bible, trust Jesus, and trust God. All good messages. But to deliver that message? To get the average inquirer to contemplate that course of action?
I'll tell faith communities what I have to tell young people all the time. Trust has to be earned. Maybe the Bible shouldn't have to earn trust, but if believers are the first, or sometimes the only Bible people will "read," then it's on us to turn the page. Maybe Jesus is someone you should trust without question, but to get to that place, you have to hear about who Jesus is and what he does. Paul puts it this way: "So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ." (Romans 10:17)
God's gracious initiative is the starting point for all faith. Yet I'm evangelistic enough to add that the Body of Christ is responsible for getting that word a fair hearing, and not overshadowing the message with our actions. In today's world, the initial deposit of trust that's needed is overdrawn when it comes to institutions of any sort, religious ones included.
Do we want the Gospel heard, and understood, and believed? I think the most effective evangelistic strategy is to earn the trust that opens the door for faith to enter in. Congregations need to earn trust, clergy need to earn trust, church institutions need to earn trust. In many cases, they may not be the ones who caused a lack of trust, but it doesn't matter.
Many of us remember when preachers and religious groups were trusted simply because of who they were. It may not be fair that trust is no longer granted as freely, but the reality is trust today has to be earned, in open and honest dealing, with financial transparency and accountability, and in all things with a humble understanding that trust has to be earned.
If we as believers live lives filled with hope, encouragement, and upbuilding those around us; if in our living there is love shown to those in need, healing offered to those in pain, and joy and hope abounding — then people will ask "what gives you this way of looking at and living in the world?"
That's when our answers might be found worthy, by hearers, of that initial measure of trust which can open up a heart for faith.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows some of you were hoping for a killer app. Tell him how you see trust being earned at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 7-19-24
Faith Works 7-19-24
Jeff Gill
The theology of experience, spiritual and technological
___
What is "a community of trust"?
This is a formulation I closed with last week as we were talking about the firehose of information which obscures as much as it illuminates. It's not just "fake news" or deep fakes or outright falsehoods which confuse us today, I would argue, as it is the sheer volume of what's coming at us, beyond our ability to process.
It's no longer enough to know who in our local marketplace knows what's going on, the senior or revered or simply well-connected person. And we now don't choose between Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley for "the most trusted name in news," either.
In terms of faith and practice, we've lost a huge amount of trust in hierarchies and official channels. I could outline the reasons for this at length: it begins in living memory with Vietnam and Watergate, and continues through revelations around abuse of the vulnerable in church and camp settings, enabled whether intentionally or not by power structures which looked out for their own preservation before protecting children.
You can't just say "because the church says so" about much of anything. Maybe, just maybe that line of argument never really did work, but today it's clear to preachers and evangelists and advocates alike that the appeal to authority is not going to open up an audience.
Yet there are many of us who've worked and served in church leadership, from the local to the more general, who would point out, chastened but firmly, that the appeal to experience is not as reliable as it seems. We can be fooled by what appeals to us personally, and in fact, the degree of intrinsic appeal may actually make us more vulnerable to deception. Our experience is, by definition, limited to what we've experienced, and that's a small slice of the reality now available to us.
In other words, we need some authorities in our lives. Dictionaries to settle arguments in Scrabble, weather apps to let us know what's going on over the horizon, news channels to help us understand what we are called to do as citizens in a democracy. Maybe even a Bible for a witness to the much bigger picture beyond our own experience, a Big Picture into which we fit.
Still, we don't know which authorities we should listen to about the Bible, when we're unsure or even more dangerously resistant to giving "an old book" any authority over our lives. I find many people, even unchurched people, suspect the Bible is a source of more than just "old stuff," but when it comes to life application, to taking ancient lessons and using them to define our current experience, they're wary more of who is telling them what the Bible says than they are of the book itself.
Being an ordained clergy person is not enough; being an established church tradition or denomination carries almost no weight at all. Look at how many choose to be married by a friend or colleague ordained for $25 out of an advertisement, not a formally recognized minister. The same sort of indifference increasingly applies to funeral services and who leads them, how they're handled, or what is said.
This is where most churches are finding we are rebuilding the concept of "a community of trust" from scratch. The old logos and relationships are not working on their own to establish trust. But how do we accomplish that in the media environment of today?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to be a trustworthy source of illumination. Tell him how you decide whom to trust at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 7-12-24
Faith Works 7-12-24
Jeff Gill
Face to face in an electronic age
___
There's a cause and effect question I continue to have about contact and communications and technology.
There's a cause and effect question I continue to have about contact and communications and technology.
I was talking about agoras, marketplaces recently, and how Paul and the early Christian church would communicate the good news of God's love made known in Jesus Christ through simple everyday personal interactions. Paul, and Priscilla and Aquila, and most of the apostles as they moved out from Israel, did their initial evangelistic work through face to face encounters. Tent making on the edge of the market plaza was a setting where you could sit and work and talk to passersby.
Obviously, Paul and Priscilla and Aquila did not compete with re-runs of "Friends" pulling people home to watch TV, or potential customers walking around head down viewing Tik Tok videos on their phone. Talking to each other was pretty much all they had.
Jump ahead in the history of evangelism, and we can make interesting connections between the invention of movable type and printing press technology and the Protestant Reformation (cheer or boo as you are so moved). Sailing and navigation technology combine with improved machining of materials for buggies and coaches to put populations as well as goods on the move. Did all of this change how we both teach rising generations about the faith of their ancestors, or present the Gospel to new audiences and different cultures? Of course it did.
Then we get internal combustion engines, airplanes, and interstate highways: all drawing closer to our time, while speeding up the pace of change. Television follows radio, cell phones replace landlines, and then the internet. [Gasps for air.]
So I asked last week "Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?" The pace of change, and the impact on faith communities of all sorts, has some wondering if we need to think very differently about how we use technology, even as even small rural congregations have raced to embrace screens in the sanctuary and learned how to stream services.
It's a mess. But did church leaders think that after Gutenberg complicated how information was shared? Did pioneer preachers dread the influence of national radio broadcasts into parishioners' homes? (Yes, and yes.) Religious faith in general and Christianity in particular has dealt with many such transformations over the last two thousand years. We talk about "Dark Ages" not because all human advancement stopped in the Medieval period, but because many leaders, secular and sacred, thought the fall of the Roman Empire would mean the end to effective communication and illumination . . . which is not, in fact, what happened.
Now we seem to be entering an age of not darkness, but of too much illumination, a light beam of so much information pouring over us it blinds us. We do need sunglasses; the future or even the present is so "bright" we gotta wear shades. Or at least filters, like eclipse glasses to allow only a certain amount of illumination through.
The problem with those filters, though, is who decides what is important information? How do we know which authorities to listen to? Because we cannot learn or even internalize everything that's pouring out over us. And I don't even know how to use all the apps that are on my phone as it is.
This is where a community of trust comes in. We need to start identifying what a trustworthy network of leadership and mentorship and teaching looks like, especially around faith. And I think technology can be part of that.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is setting up some thoughts, but is still open to input. Tell him where you turn for trustworthy information at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, July 01, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24
Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24
Jeff Gill
An extended consideration of the life and times of Patrick Cunningham
___
Who was Patrick Cunningham?
Who was Patrick Cunningham?
He's a pioneering figure in the history of Licking County.
Born in Ireland, he came to America early enough to have fought in the American Revolution with the Pennsylvania Militia.
Somehow, he ends up alone, a widower, perhaps twice over, in what will become known as Granville Township by 1801; the next fall, in October of 1802, he helps John Jones bury his wife Lillie before leaving to retreat with his children into the Marietta, Ohio area, as a near neighbor to the east willing to offer the last assistance one can offer.
Within a few more years, he takes it upon himself to dig Lillie Jones back up, and move her remains to Newark, Ohio's newly formalized burying ground, so that the "Nash cabin," once the Jones family home, is innocent of mortuary significance by the time the Granville Land Company settlers arrive in November of 1805. Just to the east the outlines of the Cunningham cabin and orchard can still be traced along the hillside to the turn of the century, hints still visible in today's Munson Springs Reserve.
A year or so after her postmortem trip to Newark, Lillie Jones will be dug up and moved once more, back to the west, to the newly laid out Old Colony Burying Ground, established by Granville's settlers, not the first burial there but ironically the oldest.
Meanwhile, Patrick Cunningham, veteran of the Revolution, has established himself in Newark, and became bailiff and jailer for the newly established Licking County Common Pleas Court after 1808. Now called "Paddy" as the county jailer and bailiff, he resides with his likely third wife at the new county jail south of Gen. Schenck's carefully surveyed Courthouse Square. He will outlive her, and bury her at Newark's Sixth Street Cemetery; his son William, who will fight in the War of 1812 and survive a siege and battle outside Fort Detroit, but will be an early interment at Franklinton's old cemetery in 1815 as he tried to return home, now just across the Scioto from Columbus and not far from lower.com Field today. A son of William, John Cunningham would serve as a deputy sheriff, deputy auditor, and perhaps the earliest attendance officer or "enumerator" for Newark schools before his death in 1884.
Meanwhile, having outlived both children and wives, Patrick Cunningham will end his days in the care of a brother in the vicinity of what is now Hebron, Ohio, in southern Licking County. A son of Theophilus Rees, the first Welsh settler of Granville Township in 1802, with the same name as his father, will become an original settler of Hebron and at the historic Licking Baptist Cemetery off Beaver Run there are Cunningham brothers and nephews and other relatives marked, with a single unmarked grave in their midst likely that of Patrick, living out his last days into his late 80s in that vicinity, buried there in 1832.
Patrick Cunningham would have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were leading citizens of Newark as Licking County grew, but by 1936 the last of his descendants are gone. Cunningham is no longer a pioneer name to reckon with, but his role in our earliest days as a community is worth remembering.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; tell him about pieces of the puzzle he might have missed at @knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Faith Works 7-5-24
Faith Works 7-5-24
Jeff Gill
Making connections in a divisive era
___
In recent weeks I've ruminated about retail formats and communications technology, and some of you have emailed or messaged me to say "Jeff, you're not talking about faith!"
In recent weeks I've ruminated about retail formats and communications technology, and some of you have emailed or messaged me to say "Jeff, you're not talking about faith!"
I get it. I do.
What I'd love to do is spend time in this space outlining spiritual disciplines and personal practices which lead to inner peace and outward work towards God's justice. Maybe I could do a better job of that.
Where today's marketplace is, though, is different.
In the last few months I've had a number of friends and colleagues travel to the eastern Mediterranean and post pictures along with stories from their travels. They put some contemporary images alongside my own awareness of ancient archaeology, and the textual witness. In most Greek speaking cities of the Ancient Near East was an "agora," a marketplace which was where people came to do business, to interact.
Home was often a compound, a walled enclosure with many buildings backing onto a perimeter barrier and a single gate, and I have friends who in relatively recent years have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, who tell me about such extended family residences.
So combine that more immediate image of a residential enclosure with the ancient world, and marketplace for social interaction which was on the edge of the administrative center, with a central plaza, often a well nearby, and booths set up for short term rental or some in family hands for generations, and downwind a less desirable open end of the three-sided square which was seasonally home for hide tanners and tent makers.
In the middle, an open space, like any courthouse square or main street or "broad way," so to speak, where people on certain days would gather and converse and discuss and even debate.
This was the context, the setting, for Paul's initial teaching and preaching, from the Areopagus in Athens at the foot of the Acropolis, to agoras in smaller cities like Corinth and Thessaly and Ephesus. The public marketplace was a cultural norm and a social technology, like a courthouse square in our more recent past, or a mall very recently.
Today? In 2024 and what is to come, how do we put ourselves in the path of those seeking the way to God, towards hope, in the direction of redemption? Do we go downtown, or the blocks adjoining? That was once the smart way to preach and build and invite: put a church near the center of the city. If we are buying and selling and shopping and investing online, then faith needs to be present, somehow, in those "places" (quotation marks quite intentional).
Yet we do not understand how virtual connections, artificial intelligence, online realities, shape the person, the families, the souls which are the intended focus of faith communities. We just don't. Agoras turned into cities which became malls which are now . . . something else. Churches went from the four corners downtown (look at Granville, for pity's sake) to a ring of steeples a block beyond the retail core to big boxes parked out just beyond the retail big boxes and vast parking areas. It all makes a certain amount of sense, but . . .
Now some suggest we need to create churches, and be faith communities, which are almost Luddite. And I get that, too. We set aside our phones and tablets, and turn back to printed programs, bound books, Bibles in print, not online. That's one way to be counter cultural today. Will it build deeper roots and more lasting institutions? It might, but it might not.
Or is there a way for faith and prophetic vision and religious institutions to create community in the middle of the personalized technology we all carry around with us? Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is definitely thinking out loud, and that's not always a good thing. Tell him what you think he's trying to say at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Friday, June 28, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 7-11-24
Notes from my Knapsack 7-11-24
Jeff Gill
New tours of the vastness of the Newark Earthworks
___
On Saturday, July 20th, I will be leading two tours, one at 9 am and another at 6 pm, of the eastern half of the Newark Earthworks.
This is a double helping of the tour I've led many times over the last few decades, starting and ending at the Great Circle just off of Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, but walking the streets to view "remnants" in between the major preserved elements of that two thousand year old, four and a half square mile complex.
We have two major portions preserved by citizens of Licking County back in the Nineteenth Century, acts of awareness which we benefit from today: the Great Circle set aside in the 1850s as the county fairground, and the Octagon Earthworks in 1891 by vote of the citizens on a ten year bond issue to purchase the parcel. Yet in between, spanning a mile and more of today's Newark neighborhoods, there are bits and pieces, remnants of the original complex, you can still see.
The long running "Remnants Tour" I lead takes about three hours, covering three and a half miles of walking, down side streets and along a few alleys, to surprise even longtime local residents with what's still visible beyond the two large earthwork parks. But it covers barely half of the eastern half of the complex as it once was.
This is why I'm excited about the opportunity on Monday, July 22nd, at 9 am, to lead a "Remnants West" tour for the first time, starting and ending at the Octagon Earthworks which has one of its four "open house" days on that date. This one will be a bit shorter, taking about two hours and covering not quite two and a half miles, staying west of 21st St. just as the Remnants East tour (as we'll need to call it now!) loops north and back to the south all well east of 21st. St.
These Remnants tours help the visitor see how much of the Newark Earthworks are still present on the landscape, and by walking the outlines of what was once fully present here you get a sense of the scale of what Native American builders accomplished along Raccoon Creek two millennia ago.
While the route is fairly level and easy, we do cross busy streets, and walkers are asked to bring a good hat or sunscreen, and water (it is July in Ohio, after all!). In previous years we've had two ventures at walking the entire outline of the Newark Earthworks, which takes most of a day and covers about seven miles, so it seems prudent to keep with two shorter loops for logistical purposes: but if you come to one of the Remnants East walking tours on Saturday, and then Remnants West on Monday morning, you'll see most of the whole between the two!
Or just enjoy the grounds of Octagon Earthworks at the corner of Parkview and 33rd St. between 10 am and 4 pm on Monday, July 22 for yourself. It is indeed a sight to see, and to experience.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to covering some "new ground" this month. Tell him where you're seeing sights this summer at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
New tours of the vastness of the Newark Earthworks
___
On Saturday, July 20th, I will be leading two tours, one at 9 am and another at 6 pm, of the eastern half of the Newark Earthworks.
This is a double helping of the tour I've led many times over the last few decades, starting and ending at the Great Circle just off of Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, but walking the streets to view "remnants" in between the major preserved elements of that two thousand year old, four and a half square mile complex.
We have two major portions preserved by citizens of Licking County back in the Nineteenth Century, acts of awareness which we benefit from today: the Great Circle set aside in the 1850s as the county fairground, and the Octagon Earthworks in 1891 by vote of the citizens on a ten year bond issue to purchase the parcel. Yet in between, spanning a mile and more of today's Newark neighborhoods, there are bits and pieces, remnants of the original complex, you can still see.
The long running "Remnants Tour" I lead takes about three hours, covering three and a half miles of walking, down side streets and along a few alleys, to surprise even longtime local residents with what's still visible beyond the two large earthwork parks. But it covers barely half of the eastern half of the complex as it once was.
This is why I'm excited about the opportunity on Monday, July 22nd, at 9 am, to lead a "Remnants West" tour for the first time, starting and ending at the Octagon Earthworks which has one of its four "open house" days on that date. This one will be a bit shorter, taking about two hours and covering not quite two and a half miles, staying west of 21st St. just as the Remnants East tour (as we'll need to call it now!) loops north and back to the south all well east of 21st. St.
These Remnants tours help the visitor see how much of the Newark Earthworks are still present on the landscape, and by walking the outlines of what was once fully present here you get a sense of the scale of what Native American builders accomplished along Raccoon Creek two millennia ago.
While the route is fairly level and easy, we do cross busy streets, and walkers are asked to bring a good hat or sunscreen, and water (it is July in Ohio, after all!). In previous years we've had two ventures at walking the entire outline of the Newark Earthworks, which takes most of a day and covers about seven miles, so it seems prudent to keep with two shorter loops for logistical purposes: but if you come to one of the Remnants East walking tours on Saturday, and then Remnants West on Monday morning, you'll see most of the whole between the two!
Or just enjoy the grounds of Octagon Earthworks at the corner of Parkview and 33rd St. between 10 am and 4 pm on Monday, July 22 for yourself. It is indeed a sight to see, and to experience.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to covering some "new ground" this month. Tell him where you're seeing sights this summer at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, June 24, 2024
Faith Works 6-28-24
Faith Works 6-28-24
Jeff Gill
Contact and communication in the summertime
___
Word out of Los Angeles is that their giant school district is taking steps to ban or block student use of cell phones on campus. Still many details to come, I can tell.
When I've written about school staff talking about their concerns around student use and misuse of smartphones during the school day, I've quickly gotten pushback from parents about the core concern they have over being able to be in touch with their children, and the issues they raise are not just "to prevent them from having a bad day" or other easy retorts one could offer.
Health and medical issues, as well as problems with existing student care plans arising, are real and a problem. It's not as simple as "well, write the IEP to give them permission to have a cell phone on their person" which is one reaction that comes up often. Having one in a hundred students with an authorized phone creates issues all their own, including pressure from peers to use their phone, et cetera. You can imagine how some of those scenarios would play out.
Meanwhile, reputable scholars and educators, Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt foremost among them, are mustering evidence that smartphones and social media should be held back from children until age 16 or thereabouts. And as I've said here before, local educators have said to me they believe the harm they see done between youth with this technology makes them want to treat smartphones like firearms: legal in society, perhaps, but completely banned on school property. I'll admit, it seems drastic, but I got to grow up without these tools, and didn't have to learn how to manage them until I was, um, old. Older, anyhow. It was still fairly new when my child got to that age, and we simply didn't have to deal with the question of a nine year old having an Instagram account, or a twelve year old with Snapchat.
What I recall each summer, now, is my work in the 1970s through the early 2000s as a director of summer camp programs, Scout camps and later church camps. There was an arc to the week that you got used to, starting with arrival and check-in on Sunday.
Sunday night to some degree, but more insistently on Mondays, you dealt with homesickness. I worked early on with mostly middle and high school youth, later on third through fifth graders. If you had a hundred kids at that particular week, you would have two or three "homesickers" to deal with. The cabin counselor would do what they could, but the most upset or fearful would end up referred to you, sobbing on a bench while the rest of the group went to the pool or had some other activity, or maybe even outside of the dining hall during meal time.
I always had an ace in the hole, though. There was one, count 'em, one phone in camp, usually in the kitchen. Maybe a second one in the camp office at the other end of the grounds. No kid got to a phone without the director's say-so. Some camp directors used the "phone's down, no idea when it will be working" trick. To each their own, but I never did that one. I just explained they couldn't use the phone until I gave permission, and as the single path to calling home, they had to talk to me.
Let's just say that is not an option any camp director has today. And that's a huge loss of leverage. But the toothpaste is out of the tube.
How should people of faith think about and talk about social media? There's more to consider here, and the summertime may be a good time to do that.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he had a candy bar phone as long as he could. Tell him how you would like to see churches respond to this issue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Contact and communication in the summertime
___
Word out of Los Angeles is that their giant school district is taking steps to ban or block student use of cell phones on campus. Still many details to come, I can tell.
When I've written about school staff talking about their concerns around student use and misuse of smartphones during the school day, I've quickly gotten pushback from parents about the core concern they have over being able to be in touch with their children, and the issues they raise are not just "to prevent them from having a bad day" or other easy retorts one could offer.
Health and medical issues, as well as problems with existing student care plans arising, are real and a problem. It's not as simple as "well, write the IEP to give them permission to have a cell phone on their person" which is one reaction that comes up often. Having one in a hundred students with an authorized phone creates issues all their own, including pressure from peers to use their phone, et cetera. You can imagine how some of those scenarios would play out.
Meanwhile, reputable scholars and educators, Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt foremost among them, are mustering evidence that smartphones and social media should be held back from children until age 16 or thereabouts. And as I've said here before, local educators have said to me they believe the harm they see done between youth with this technology makes them want to treat smartphones like firearms: legal in society, perhaps, but completely banned on school property. I'll admit, it seems drastic, but I got to grow up without these tools, and didn't have to learn how to manage them until I was, um, old. Older, anyhow. It was still fairly new when my child got to that age, and we simply didn't have to deal with the question of a nine year old having an Instagram account, or a twelve year old with Snapchat.
What I recall each summer, now, is my work in the 1970s through the early 2000s as a director of summer camp programs, Scout camps and later church camps. There was an arc to the week that you got used to, starting with arrival and check-in on Sunday.
Sunday night to some degree, but more insistently on Mondays, you dealt with homesickness. I worked early on with mostly middle and high school youth, later on third through fifth graders. If you had a hundred kids at that particular week, you would have two or three "homesickers" to deal with. The cabin counselor would do what they could, but the most upset or fearful would end up referred to you, sobbing on a bench while the rest of the group went to the pool or had some other activity, or maybe even outside of the dining hall during meal time.
I always had an ace in the hole, though. There was one, count 'em, one phone in camp, usually in the kitchen. Maybe a second one in the camp office at the other end of the grounds. No kid got to a phone without the director's say-so. Some camp directors used the "phone's down, no idea when it will be working" trick. To each their own, but I never did that one. I just explained they couldn't use the phone until I gave permission, and as the single path to calling home, they had to talk to me.
Let's just say that is not an option any camp director has today. And that's a huge loss of leverage. But the toothpaste is out of the tube.
How should people of faith think about and talk about social media? There's more to consider here, and the summertime may be a good time to do that.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he had a candy bar phone as long as he could. Tell him how you would like to see churches respond to this issue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Faith Works 6-21-24
Faith Works 6-21-24
Jeff Gill
Retail and religion in tension and relation
___
If you would indulge me in a mental meander, I thank you! My plan is to end up in church, but we won't start there.
What I'm thinking about is the development of retail, and how over time the architecture and community relationships to and through our stores have changed.
Far enough back, you have dry goods and grocery stores in the heart of a settlement or village. A shop, usually with a table or counter between you and the goods, versus the more transient markets where a cart or wagon pulls up loaded with produce or trade items. You walk up and dicker or work out exchanges, and go home with your food and materials that augment what you've raised and grown and made on your own.
These develop into larger mercantile establishments, with more shelving and increased inventory, until Piggly Wiggly comes along about a hundred years ago and invents self-service. The customer walks along the aisles, prices are marked, and you check out with a clerk, rather than having the clerk get your items for you off restricted shelves. Before 1916, no one saw this; by the 1930s they were the norm (but a new norm).
Markets were still neighborhood affairs, though. When I first came to Hebron in 1999, people still remembered the storefront which had been the Kroger outlet in town, long before the large modern Kroger supermarket was built out on the edge of the community. This also got my father-in-law talking about the corner store Kroger he helped run through World War II as a pre-teen with a lady manager, in Indianapolis. There was produce, and a butcher in the back, but the whole thing couldn't have been a thousand square feet (we visited the corner, where the building still stands).
Supermarkets after the war were just that: super. They had a full service produce department, milk coolers in the back, a meat counter with friendly butchers, and often a pharmacy to boot. They were bigger, in purpose built buildings, and out on the edge of town usually. Growing up in the Sixties, I remember my mother going to our fairly new supermarket, but also sometimes visiting the local IGA, mysteriously smaller but just as capacious, and would ride my bike to one of a couple of neighborhood groceries which were holding on another decade or two, mostly as package liquor stores with a few sundries before they closed.
Big box retail was developing in the South, though, and by 2000 was all across the country, with grocery and retail in the same sprawling complex, built further out of town and continuing to empty downtowns beyond what malls had already done.
Yet as big box retail and supercenters peaked, the A-word comes along, nibbling away at profit margins to an even smaller percentage, but with volume accomplished through delivery. Now, even further out of most communities, built in cornfields, are giant distribution centers where we're back to pre-Piggly Wiggly retail. The goods are all behind the electronic counter, and the e-clerk gets our goods and delivers them to our homes.
Where am I going with this obvious but perhaps not often enough considered narrative? Well, once we had rural frame churches, then town brick and stone edifices, with full time preachers. Suburbs attracted growth and new church plants, with education wings and added staff.
Now we have, well, big boxes built on land out beyond the edge of things, with increasing numbers of people receiving their spiritual care by way of online means. I guess what I'm mulling is how our retail development and changes in church life are in parallel. What does this mean, and where will it take us? More to contemplate.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he still gets to preach in small wood frame churches from time to time, they're out there. Tell him what this all makes you think about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Retail and religion in tension and relation
___
If you would indulge me in a mental meander, I thank you! My plan is to end up in church, but we won't start there.
What I'm thinking about is the development of retail, and how over time the architecture and community relationships to and through our stores have changed.
Far enough back, you have dry goods and grocery stores in the heart of a settlement or village. A shop, usually with a table or counter between you and the goods, versus the more transient markets where a cart or wagon pulls up loaded with produce or trade items. You walk up and dicker or work out exchanges, and go home with your food and materials that augment what you've raised and grown and made on your own.
These develop into larger mercantile establishments, with more shelving and increased inventory, until Piggly Wiggly comes along about a hundred years ago and invents self-service. The customer walks along the aisles, prices are marked, and you check out with a clerk, rather than having the clerk get your items for you off restricted shelves. Before 1916, no one saw this; by the 1930s they were the norm (but a new norm).
Markets were still neighborhood affairs, though. When I first came to Hebron in 1999, people still remembered the storefront which had been the Kroger outlet in town, long before the large modern Kroger supermarket was built out on the edge of the community. This also got my father-in-law talking about the corner store Kroger he helped run through World War II as a pre-teen with a lady manager, in Indianapolis. There was produce, and a butcher in the back, but the whole thing couldn't have been a thousand square feet (we visited the corner, where the building still stands).
Supermarkets after the war were just that: super. They had a full service produce department, milk coolers in the back, a meat counter with friendly butchers, and often a pharmacy to boot. They were bigger, in purpose built buildings, and out on the edge of town usually. Growing up in the Sixties, I remember my mother going to our fairly new supermarket, but also sometimes visiting the local IGA, mysteriously smaller but just as capacious, and would ride my bike to one of a couple of neighborhood groceries which were holding on another decade or two, mostly as package liquor stores with a few sundries before they closed.
Big box retail was developing in the South, though, and by 2000 was all across the country, with grocery and retail in the same sprawling complex, built further out of town and continuing to empty downtowns beyond what malls had already done.
Yet as big box retail and supercenters peaked, the A-word comes along, nibbling away at profit margins to an even smaller percentage, but with volume accomplished through delivery. Now, even further out of most communities, built in cornfields, are giant distribution centers where we're back to pre-Piggly Wiggly retail. The goods are all behind the electronic counter, and the e-clerk gets our goods and delivers them to our homes.
Where am I going with this obvious but perhaps not often enough considered narrative? Well, once we had rural frame churches, then town brick and stone edifices, with full time preachers. Suburbs attracted growth and new church plants, with education wings and added staff.
Now we have, well, big boxes built on land out beyond the edge of things, with increasing numbers of people receiving their spiritual care by way of online means. I guess what I'm mulling is how our retail development and changes in church life are in parallel. What does this mean, and where will it take us? More to contemplate.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he still gets to preach in small wood frame churches from time to time, they're out there. Tell him what this all makes you think about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 6-27-24
Notes from my Knapsack 6-27-24
Jeff Gill
A "Million Dollar Year" with a century of implications
___
1924 was perhaps the most remarkable year in Granville history since 1805, and would not be matched until possibly 2022.
Even Intel coming to the area has not (yet) had the direct impact on the immediate visual and functional landscape of Our Fayre Village that 1924 had, and still haves.
In fact, looking at why the "Granville Times" newspaper called that year a "Million Dollar" occasion, and back when a million dollars was [cough] a large sum of money, it's hard to imagine clearly what it was like before then.
Swasey Chapel up atop the hill was dedicated, anchoring the campus and creating a landmark for miles around pointing to Granville. Two new dormitories on the East Quad were going up, signaling larger changes in the student population of Denison University.
In the heart of the village, the Baptist state offices, now our village hall, were going up even as a new bank building, now Park National, was being completed on the other end of that block on Broadway.
Just to the east, the Sinnett House was moved off of Broadway to make room for a new library, not finished in this remarkable year but under way; a little further east on the other side of the main thoroughfare, Granville was getting a new high school on Granger Street, now almost 30 years gone.
And in between, where once stood the Granville Female College, now demolished, rose The Granville Inn. It would be dedicated with a great celebration on June 26, 1924. Costing over $600,000 at the time, adjusted for inflation would make that more like $11,000,000 today. Capping off that expenditure of effective millions, John Sutphin Jones also built a fine golf course just east of the village, west of his country home the Bryn Du Mansion. 1924 was truly a "Million Dollar Year."
I invite you to try to imagine Granville without Swasey overhead, no Frank Packard library or inn along Broadway, or the two major buildings of the core downtown block built that year. Erase them in your imagination. True, we still have the four churches, and there's still education going on atop College Hill, but the Greek Revival style is a bit more dominant at St. Luke's and the Avery-Downer House, and you can ask if our community has the vitality it has taken to preserve even those two buildings if all the other activity had not come to pass.
Earlier historians like William Utter and Jamie Hale have noted how it was only a few years earlier that electricity to the village, and a public sewer system, had started to make Granville a more salubrious location to live. There are hints in the record that our local coal magnate had made such civic infrastructure a condition before he spent his money to build the inn and support the fine new library. In the history of local development, which comes first? Just as water is key to industrial and residential development today, so was the addition of what in 1920 was still a new and controversial step to electrify and make more flushable our community.
The Granville Inn will celebrate a century this month; that occasion also reminds us to think together about the century ahead, and what future Granville residents couldn't imagine our village without.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; there's a story behind every building worth learning and telling. What building can't you imagine living without? Tell him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
A "Million Dollar Year" with a century of implications
___
1924 was perhaps the most remarkable year in Granville history since 1805, and would not be matched until possibly 2022.
Even Intel coming to the area has not (yet) had the direct impact on the immediate visual and functional landscape of Our Fayre Village that 1924 had, and still haves.
In fact, looking at why the "Granville Times" newspaper called that year a "Million Dollar" occasion, and back when a million dollars was [cough] a large sum of money, it's hard to imagine clearly what it was like before then.
Swasey Chapel up atop the hill was dedicated, anchoring the campus and creating a landmark for miles around pointing to Granville. Two new dormitories on the East Quad were going up, signaling larger changes in the student population of Denison University.
In the heart of the village, the Baptist state offices, now our village hall, were going up even as a new bank building, now Park National, was being completed on the other end of that block on Broadway.
Just to the east, the Sinnett House was moved off of Broadway to make room for a new library, not finished in this remarkable year but under way; a little further east on the other side of the main thoroughfare, Granville was getting a new high school on Granger Street, now almost 30 years gone.
And in between, where once stood the Granville Female College, now demolished, rose The Granville Inn. It would be dedicated with a great celebration on June 26, 1924. Costing over $600,000 at the time, adjusted for inflation would make that more like $11,000,000 today. Capping off that expenditure of effective millions, John Sutphin Jones also built a fine golf course just east of the village, west of his country home the Bryn Du Mansion. 1924 was truly a "Million Dollar Year."
I invite you to try to imagine Granville without Swasey overhead, no Frank Packard library or inn along Broadway, or the two major buildings of the core downtown block built that year. Erase them in your imagination. True, we still have the four churches, and there's still education going on atop College Hill, but the Greek Revival style is a bit more dominant at St. Luke's and the Avery-Downer House, and you can ask if our community has the vitality it has taken to preserve even those two buildings if all the other activity had not come to pass.
Earlier historians like William Utter and Jamie Hale have noted how it was only a few years earlier that electricity to the village, and a public sewer system, had started to make Granville a more salubrious location to live. There are hints in the record that our local coal magnate had made such civic infrastructure a condition before he spent his money to build the inn and support the fine new library. In the history of local development, which comes first? Just as water is key to industrial and residential development today, so was the addition of what in 1920 was still a new and controversial step to electrify and make more flushable our community.
The Granville Inn will celebrate a century this month; that occasion also reminds us to think together about the century ahead, and what future Granville residents couldn't imagine our village without.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; there's a story behind every building worth learning and telling. What building can't you imagine living without? Tell him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, June 08, 2024
Faith Works 6-14-24
Faith Works 6-14-24
Jeff Gill
Hearing good news, 80 years ago
___
The most prep time I ever put into a single sermon was for Sunday, June 5, 1994, which turns out to be thirty years ago. That sermon was weak, perhaps, on preaching the Gospel, but it did have the overt intention of tying the meaning of "gospel" & "good news" together.
What I was trying to communicate was how people felt when they heard about D-Day, then fifty years before. We had no one in the congregation I served at the time in Fairmont, West Virginia who had landed in Normandy that day, but there were many still in that community who had been serving both overseas and "fighting the home front" in 1944.
So I went around speaking to now 70 & 80 & 90 year olds, just trying to capture something of what they felt on hearing the news that the Allies had landed in Europe on June 6th. I talked to a woman who had been young that day, with a boyfriend overseas, who thought "they'll be home soon." Not as soon as she hoped, but D-Day meant it would be sooner. Another woman working in a cafeteria downtown told of how the radio was brought out of the kitchen and set up on the counter, so all could hear the news. One lady told me about being called inside by her mother as she hung laundry out back: "you'd better hear this for yourself."
There were a number of men who had been serving in the Pacific, aboard Navy ships; each felt a surge of pride, and a question: how soon will this bring more forces over to our theatre of the war? Some heard it secondhand down in the engineering spaces from a runner off the bridge, some on their ship's intercom system rebroadcasting to the whole crew while under weigh. Other men and women were at work in defense industry in California, riveting armor onto bomber airframes or testing plexiglas canopies, and the news came along the line in bits and pieces, while the work went on. My Uncle Clair, reached on the phone in 1994, almost as deaf as my father but who didn't like wearing hearing aids, had trouble catching my question, but when he did, after explaining he was in New Guinea sweating up a storm replacing engines in B-24s, bellowed "well, we were damned glad to hear about it, let me tell you!"
I talked closer to home with men who had been aircrew on B-17s waiting on bases in northern England, all dimly aware of preparations in the south for invasion, but all cloaked with secrecy. "Now it's come," they thought. "Soon we will be flying all the way to Berlin."
And perhaps most riveting was a lady in a nursing care wing of the hospital, whose English was still poor, born and raised in Holland, grew up a young woman in Southeast Asia, come to America with a man with a complex story of her journey from Florida to West Virginia: but on June 6, 1944, she was a Resistance member riding a trolleycar in Rotterdam, when the story was whispered from one seat to the next "the Allies have landed in France." Antje told me the tale whipped around the city, and as she walked home with a meager harvest of groceries, the German soldiers on every street corner seemed even more on edge, wary, tense.
She felt hope, for the first time in a long while.
That, I tried to connect, is what hearing the Gospel, God's good news of grace, can and should be like for any of us. Those stories have also kept me tied to that day, June 6th, 1944, ever since. All those I spoke to those weeks before the 50th anniversary are gone; I share their stories with you now so you might pass them along, too.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's always glad to hear new stories, especially about old things. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Hearing good news, 80 years ago
___
The most prep time I ever put into a single sermon was for Sunday, June 5, 1994, which turns out to be thirty years ago. That sermon was weak, perhaps, on preaching the Gospel, but it did have the overt intention of tying the meaning of "gospel" & "good news" together.
What I was trying to communicate was how people felt when they heard about D-Day, then fifty years before. We had no one in the congregation I served at the time in Fairmont, West Virginia who had landed in Normandy that day, but there were many still in that community who had been serving both overseas and "fighting the home front" in 1944.
So I went around speaking to now 70 & 80 & 90 year olds, just trying to capture something of what they felt on hearing the news that the Allies had landed in Europe on June 6th. I talked to a woman who had been young that day, with a boyfriend overseas, who thought "they'll be home soon." Not as soon as she hoped, but D-Day meant it would be sooner. Another woman working in a cafeteria downtown told of how the radio was brought out of the kitchen and set up on the counter, so all could hear the news. One lady told me about being called inside by her mother as she hung laundry out back: "you'd better hear this for yourself."
There were a number of men who had been serving in the Pacific, aboard Navy ships; each felt a surge of pride, and a question: how soon will this bring more forces over to our theatre of the war? Some heard it secondhand down in the engineering spaces from a runner off the bridge, some on their ship's intercom system rebroadcasting to the whole crew while under weigh. Other men and women were at work in defense industry in California, riveting armor onto bomber airframes or testing plexiglas canopies, and the news came along the line in bits and pieces, while the work went on. My Uncle Clair, reached on the phone in 1994, almost as deaf as my father but who didn't like wearing hearing aids, had trouble catching my question, but when he did, after explaining he was in New Guinea sweating up a storm replacing engines in B-24s, bellowed "well, we were damned glad to hear about it, let me tell you!"
I talked closer to home with men who had been aircrew on B-17s waiting on bases in northern England, all dimly aware of preparations in the south for invasion, but all cloaked with secrecy. "Now it's come," they thought. "Soon we will be flying all the way to Berlin."
And perhaps most riveting was a lady in a nursing care wing of the hospital, whose English was still poor, born and raised in Holland, grew up a young woman in Southeast Asia, come to America with a man with a complex story of her journey from Florida to West Virginia: but on June 6, 1944, she was a Resistance member riding a trolleycar in Rotterdam, when the story was whispered from one seat to the next "the Allies have landed in France." Antje told me the tale whipped around the city, and as she walked home with a meager harvest of groceries, the German soldiers on every street corner seemed even more on edge, wary, tense.
She felt hope, for the first time in a long while.
That, I tried to connect, is what hearing the Gospel, God's good news of grace, can and should be like for any of us. Those stories have also kept me tied to that day, June 6th, 1944, ever since. All those I spoke to those weeks before the 50th anniversary are gone; I share their stories with you now so you might pass them along, too.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's always glad to hear new stories, especially about old things. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, June 03, 2024
Faith Works 6-7-24
Faith Works 6-7-24
Jeff Gill
Spending time in jail, good for the soul?
___
"In Ohio, about 16,500 people are in jail on any given night and 300,000 are booked into jails each year. Jails hold people immediately after arrest, who are awaiting trial and are serving less than 12-month sentence."
That passage was recently in the pages of the Newark Advocate, and also in a number of our partners in the USA TODAY Network Ohio. I invite you to pause, whether you can read the whole piece (or series) or not -- kudos to USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau reporters Laura Bischoff and Erin Glynn, who anchored the reporting and writing of it, and you really should subscribe! -- to consider what that data point alone tells you. 2.5% of ALL Ohioans will be booked this year. Over any 10 year period, that ends up somewhere between 7 to as much as 10% of the population allowing for repeat visitors.
That's one thing you learn in pastoral ministry over time; I had to get out into parish work to learn the difference between jails (see definition above) and prisons (mostly felony charges with a year or more), but it was also a slowly dawning realization — friends, when a preacher gets up into the pulpit on Sunday, you are talking to a group of people of whom 10 to 20% (remember, we're talking lifetime now) have spent at least one night in jail. It does change how you talk about certain things, but it's not something you often refer to directly. Maybe we should.
Think about it, though: this year, almost 3 of every 100 adults you meet will have been through intake at the county justice center. And that's just THIS year. Or to be more direct: the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US.
When I came to Licking County in 1989, the year before a group of clergy had launched Licking County Jail Ministries (LCJM), a collaboration between many local churches and clergy to serve the newly opened Licking County Justice Center, our county jail (LCJC). Then Sheriff Gerry Billy was supportive and a real blessing to the work we did, allowing us to enter the facility with appropriate training, and for us to help his staff serve those incarcerated at the LCJC, and ultimately for us to employ a chaplain, Mark Shoemaker. He and his successor, Scott Hayes, are the only two jail chaplains we've had in some thirty-five years, a testimony to the stability and quality of the ministry they both have provided: all at the expense of the jail ministry board and supporting churches, not the taxpayers, I should note.
Sheriff Randy Thorp has continued to value the work of the LCJM, and Chaplain Hayes is deeply respected across our community. But I have to admit as a former board member and president and volunteer inside the LCJC, we may not pause to remind people often enough of the facts that Laura and her USA TODAY Network Ohio have put before us.
Again, the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US. And for Christians, we are called very directly in scripture to minister to those who are locked up; I would read those passages as enjoining us to reach out to the guilty and innocent alike. To give them hope, and a plan for their future.
Some of the most powerful Bible study experiences I've had in my life were inside the LCJC. They were holy moments, and those classrooms and modules can be holy ground. If you don't believe me, you may need to go in there sometime yourself.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not spent any nights in jail (yet), but plenty of time there. Tell him about your experiences seeking justice at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Spending time in jail, good for the soul?
___
"In Ohio, about 16,500 people are in jail on any given night and 300,000 are booked into jails each year. Jails hold people immediately after arrest, who are awaiting trial and are serving less than 12-month sentence."
That passage was recently in the pages of the Newark Advocate, and also in a number of our partners in the USA TODAY Network Ohio. I invite you to pause, whether you can read the whole piece (or series) or not -- kudos to USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau reporters Laura Bischoff and Erin Glynn, who anchored the reporting and writing of it, and you really should subscribe! -- to consider what that data point alone tells you. 2.5% of ALL Ohioans will be booked this year. Over any 10 year period, that ends up somewhere between 7 to as much as 10% of the population allowing for repeat visitors.
That's one thing you learn in pastoral ministry over time; I had to get out into parish work to learn the difference between jails (see definition above) and prisons (mostly felony charges with a year or more), but it was also a slowly dawning realization — friends, when a preacher gets up into the pulpit on Sunday, you are talking to a group of people of whom 10 to 20% (remember, we're talking lifetime now) have spent at least one night in jail. It does change how you talk about certain things, but it's not something you often refer to directly. Maybe we should.
Think about it, though: this year, almost 3 of every 100 adults you meet will have been through intake at the county justice center. And that's just THIS year. Or to be more direct: the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US.
When I came to Licking County in 1989, the year before a group of clergy had launched Licking County Jail Ministries (LCJM), a collaboration between many local churches and clergy to serve the newly opened Licking County Justice Center, our county jail (LCJC). Then Sheriff Gerry Billy was supportive and a real blessing to the work we did, allowing us to enter the facility with appropriate training, and for us to help his staff serve those incarcerated at the LCJC, and ultimately for us to employ a chaplain, Mark Shoemaker. He and his successor, Scott Hayes, are the only two jail chaplains we've had in some thirty-five years, a testimony to the stability and quality of the ministry they both have provided: all at the expense of the jail ministry board and supporting churches, not the taxpayers, I should note.
Sheriff Randy Thorp has continued to value the work of the LCJM, and Chaplain Hayes is deeply respected across our community. But I have to admit as a former board member and president and volunteer inside the LCJC, we may not pause to remind people often enough of the facts that Laura and her USA TODAY Network Ohio have put before us.
Again, the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US. And for Christians, we are called very directly in scripture to minister to those who are locked up; I would read those passages as enjoining us to reach out to the guilty and innocent alike. To give them hope, and a plan for their future.
Some of the most powerful Bible study experiences I've had in my life were inside the LCJC. They were holy moments, and those classrooms and modules can be holy ground. If you don't believe me, you may need to go in there sometime yourself.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not spent any nights in jail (yet), but plenty of time there. Tell him about your experiences seeking justice at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Friday, May 31, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 6-6-24
Notes from my Knapsack 6-6-24
Jeff Gill
Narratives in nature unfolding around us
___
Selborne is a village in southern England, in Hampshire (old, not new), and I've never been there.
However, I feel like I know it well, thanks to Gilbert White.
White was a clergyman in the Anglican Church, a graduate of Oxford, and both grew up in and returned to Selborne for most of his adult life. His fascination with birds makes White perhaps the "original" birdwatcher; while not a professional scientist, there were very few in the late 1700s, so he is by default a naturalist and ornithologist of his time, and in many ways a pioneering environmentalist.
But all of this is due to his writing, more than his scientific work, such as it was. He wrote "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," which to my chagrin is better known today simply as "The Natural History of Selborne" with the antiquities, the history and archaeology, clipped off to make a shorter and more straightforward volume which has never been out of print since 1789.
I've mentioned Rev. White here before; he shames me a bit because his record keeping supports his lyrical writing about nature and creatures around him in rustic Selborne. He practiced what's called today "phenology," or the study of cycles and starting points: when trees leaf out, when certain blossoms bloom, and of course the arrival of migrating birds.
White in a comic mode is almost certainly the reason British birdwatching helped create the running joke in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which I can't pause to explain here, but many of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. If you know the bit, it will echo in your head at many points in "The Natural History of Selborne."
As I've also noted before, there is an Ohio State "Phenology Calendar" which you can consult online at "weather.cfaes.osu.edu/gdd/" for your zip code. To track recurring biological events makes you more aware of weather and the climate more generally, starting with something as simple as the frost free date. If you are planting tomatoes, "Mothers Day" is a standard metric around here, but if you lived further north you'd have grown up with a different bit of folk phenology. We all can watch bird migration and think about when those new arrivals relate to calendar events in our own lives; I think about the seasonal appearance of insects across the summer season from my many years of Scout camp staffing.
This column has often been directly as well as indirectly inspired by Gilbert White; it has never quite been "The Natural History of Granville" but writing something similar certainly has crossed my mind (but inevitably with "and Antiquities" added, even if a later generation would take it back out). Tony Stoneburner has written me on occasion to encourage my keeping up with such observations, and I wish I'd done more along those lines.
It fascinates me that we tend to think of summer, and high summer at that, as "normal," with leaves covering the trees and hillsides obscured by foliage, birds overhead. In fact, that's less than half the year. My dad always pushed me to learn trees by bark and by shape "because they don't have leaves all the time, do they?"
But nature is all around us all the time, ever changing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to walk as much as he writes this summer. Tell him what's normal in your environment at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Narratives in nature unfolding around us
___
Selborne is a village in southern England, in Hampshire (old, not new), and I've never been there.
However, I feel like I know it well, thanks to Gilbert White.
White was a clergyman in the Anglican Church, a graduate of Oxford, and both grew up in and returned to Selborne for most of his adult life. His fascination with birds makes White perhaps the "original" birdwatcher; while not a professional scientist, there were very few in the late 1700s, so he is by default a naturalist and ornithologist of his time, and in many ways a pioneering environmentalist.
But all of this is due to his writing, more than his scientific work, such as it was. He wrote "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," which to my chagrin is better known today simply as "The Natural History of Selborne" with the antiquities, the history and archaeology, clipped off to make a shorter and more straightforward volume which has never been out of print since 1789.
I've mentioned Rev. White here before; he shames me a bit because his record keeping supports his lyrical writing about nature and creatures around him in rustic Selborne. He practiced what's called today "phenology," or the study of cycles and starting points: when trees leaf out, when certain blossoms bloom, and of course the arrival of migrating birds.
White in a comic mode is almost certainly the reason British birdwatching helped create the running joke in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which I can't pause to explain here, but many of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. If you know the bit, it will echo in your head at many points in "The Natural History of Selborne."
As I've also noted before, there is an Ohio State "Phenology Calendar" which you can consult online at "weather.cfaes.osu.edu/gdd/" for your zip code. To track recurring biological events makes you more aware of weather and the climate more generally, starting with something as simple as the frost free date. If you are planting tomatoes, "Mothers Day" is a standard metric around here, but if you lived further north you'd have grown up with a different bit of folk phenology. We all can watch bird migration and think about when those new arrivals relate to calendar events in our own lives; I think about the seasonal appearance of insects across the summer season from my many years of Scout camp staffing.
This column has often been directly as well as indirectly inspired by Gilbert White; it has never quite been "The Natural History of Granville" but writing something similar certainly has crossed my mind (but inevitably with "and Antiquities" added, even if a later generation would take it back out). Tony Stoneburner has written me on occasion to encourage my keeping up with such observations, and I wish I'd done more along those lines.
It fascinates me that we tend to think of summer, and high summer at that, as "normal," with leaves covering the trees and hillsides obscured by foliage, birds overhead. In fact, that's less than half the year. My dad always pushed me to learn trees by bark and by shape "because they don't have leaves all the time, do they?"
But nature is all around us all the time, ever changing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to walk as much as he writes this summer. Tell him what's normal in your environment at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Faith Works 5-31-24
Faith Works 5-31-24
Jeff Gill
A story with a modest moral for preachers
___
This Sunday I'm looking forward to attending worship in the Wyandot Mission Church in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and hearing Chief Billy Friend of today's Wyandotte Nation preach there. He's a preacher and a leader for his people, in Oklahoma but with deep roots still in Ohio.
In advance of Chief Friend coming to preach, I was doing some looking around online about the establishment of that Methodist mission station, the first in this county for them, the church building constructed in 1824.
I found an 1884 volume, talking about the early 1830s for a Methodist circuit rider in Ohio, Elnathan Gavitt, who was born in Granville in 1809. Elnathan as a young preacher had an older and perhaps more loquacious partner who at this time helped cover a large preaching circuit in northern Ohio, which centered on the Wyandot mission at Upper Sandusky. He tells this story from 1831 or 1832:
"On the Scioto river, near where the Pisgah Church now stands, was a log tavern kept by a friend, not a member of the Church. This was one of our preaching places where we remained over night with the landlord; and in the morning when we called for our bill he said he would prefer settling with us at the close of the year. This being the best we could do, we had to trust to his liberality in the final settlement, though with our limited means we could have wished it otherwise. However, as he was a friend to the cause of Christianity, we hoped for the best. At the close of the year we called for a final settlement. He said, as there was some credits in our favor, he would have to look over our account.
"This was a mistake, as we had not paid him anything during the year, but he insisted that he had kept a correct account, and knew more about it than we did. His account against us was quite reasonable, and somewhat better than we had expected; and now the next thing was to see for what we could have credit. Turning over the next page, he showed that he had credited us with every sermon preached, with every instance of worship, and with every blessing asked at the table. For a long sermon the credit was twenty-five cents; for a short sermon, fifty cents; long family service, twelve and one-half cents; short prayer and chapter, twenty-five cents, and the same in proportion for grace at the table. Being young and often embarrassed, all my services had received his approbation, and he now fell in my debt. My colleague being older and more prolific, fell in his debt.
"However, considering the benefit the community had received, as well as his family, and allowing something for good company, he would balance the account and call it all settled, provided we would call on him another year, if we were returned to the same charge; he then presented each of us with five dollars."
As a preacher myself, I'm going to keep that fee scale in mind! The Pisgah church is no more; it was near the Shawnee Ford on the Scioto River in Hardin County, Dudley Township, at Pfeiffer Station (unincorporated). On my way home I may stop by there and offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the generosity of Mr. Wheeler (as he was later named in Gavitt's account), in advancing the Gospel on the Ohio frontier.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been known to go on sometimes. Tell him what you thought about this story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
A story with a modest moral for preachers
___
This Sunday I'm looking forward to attending worship in the Wyandot Mission Church in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and hearing Chief Billy Friend of today's Wyandotte Nation preach there. He's a preacher and a leader for his people, in Oklahoma but with deep roots still in Ohio.
In advance of Chief Friend coming to preach, I was doing some looking around online about the establishment of that Methodist mission station, the first in this county for them, the church building constructed in 1824.
I found an 1884 volume, talking about the early 1830s for a Methodist circuit rider in Ohio, Elnathan Gavitt, who was born in Granville in 1809. Elnathan as a young preacher had an older and perhaps more loquacious partner who at this time helped cover a large preaching circuit in northern Ohio, which centered on the Wyandot mission at Upper Sandusky. He tells this story from 1831 or 1832:
"On the Scioto river, near where the Pisgah Church now stands, was a log tavern kept by a friend, not a member of the Church. This was one of our preaching places where we remained over night with the landlord; and in the morning when we called for our bill he said he would prefer settling with us at the close of the year. This being the best we could do, we had to trust to his liberality in the final settlement, though with our limited means we could have wished it otherwise. However, as he was a friend to the cause of Christianity, we hoped for the best. At the close of the year we called for a final settlement. He said, as there was some credits in our favor, he would have to look over our account.
"This was a mistake, as we had not paid him anything during the year, but he insisted that he had kept a correct account, and knew more about it than we did. His account against us was quite reasonable, and somewhat better than we had expected; and now the next thing was to see for what we could have credit. Turning over the next page, he showed that he had credited us with every sermon preached, with every instance of worship, and with every blessing asked at the table. For a long sermon the credit was twenty-five cents; for a short sermon, fifty cents; long family service, twelve and one-half cents; short prayer and chapter, twenty-five cents, and the same in proportion for grace at the table. Being young and often embarrassed, all my services had received his approbation, and he now fell in my debt. My colleague being older and more prolific, fell in his debt.
"However, considering the benefit the community had received, as well as his family, and allowing something for good company, he would balance the account and call it all settled, provided we would call on him another year, if we were returned to the same charge; he then presented each of us with five dollars."
As a preacher myself, I'm going to keep that fee scale in mind! The Pisgah church is no more; it was near the Shawnee Ford on the Scioto River in Hardin County, Dudley Township, at Pfeiffer Station (unincorporated). On my way home I may stop by there and offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the generosity of Mr. Wheeler (as he was later named in Gavitt's account), in advancing the Gospel on the Ohio frontier.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been known to go on sometimes. Tell him what you thought about this story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
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