new church life: september/october 2014
manipulative lens of power, and untainted by the dirty hands of greed.
So what can we do to foster our young people in their search for this kind
of truth? BASS is a good start! But even more important is the example we set
for them by living innocently for the Lord and unashamedly in the truths of
the Second Coming.
Thank you everyone who helped make BASS 2014 such a success.
pioneer hero
John Chapman, immortalized in American
and Swedenborgian history as Johnny
Appleseed, will be featured in a traveling
exhibit aimed at “clearing up misconceptions
about the folk hero and the real man behind
the legend.”
Cheryl Ogden, director of the Johnny
Appleseed Education Center and Museum at
Urbana University in Ohio, said the exhibit
is funded by an anonymous donation. “We
This painting is said to be the most
realistic representation of American folk
want people around the country to know the
hero Johnny Appleseed and is part of
real person, “she said, “not just the myths and
the collection at the Johnny Appleseed
the folklore. We want them to know John
Educational Center and Museum at
Urbana University in Urbana, Ohio
Chapman’s values of hard work, compassion
and generosity.”
He was known, of course, for selling seeds and planting seeds for settlers,
she said, but also was known to go barefoot after giving up his shoes to
someone in need, and also “widely distributed religious tracts as a missionary
of the Swedenborgian Church, a Christian faith embracing individualism and
spiritual growth.”
Ogden said Chapman was good at anticipating where settlers would come
and the apple seedlings he gave them were important because settlers needed
to show improvement on homesteaded parcels to claim land grants.
He was “a simple man of simple pleasures,” who became an icon to settlers
in “a new nation that needed folk heroes.”
Among the memorial markers to Johnny Appleseed is a statue in
Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery, with a barefoot Chapman lifting a
seedling with one hand while holding a book in the other – no doubt a book
of the Writings.
Johnny Appleseed festivals are celebrated in several states – including
Bryn Athyn and Sarver, Pennsylvania, among our New Church societies. An
estimated 250,000 attended the Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne,
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