Charles Hawkins

Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the unfinished work of reconciliation Thomas Jefferson had a penknife and a Bible. In his retirement at Monticello, he carefully cut passages from several editions of the New Testament, arranging those he wished to preserve into a volume of his own making. He retained much of Jesus’ moral teaching while leaving aside the miracles and supernatural claims that he found difficult to accept. Two centuries later, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution have been engaged in another kind of reconstruction. Rather than removing passages from an inherited account, they have sought to recover a history that generations of Americans had disputed or obscured. Their subject was Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello, and the children she bore. A November 2026 Smithsonian Magazine article describes the culmination of nearly fifteen years of research into that relationship. The findings, according to the author, estab...

Homily for All Saints’ Day — 1 John 3:1–3 By the Rev Dr George Lewis Boar-Hays, Vicar of Macomb In a certain house, which may no longer exist, there is a photograph of a child. The child is perhaps six years old. He stands beside a woman whose name has been forgotten. Behind them is a garden, and beyond the garden, a wall. The photograph preserves an instant that has vanished from the world. The child does not know that he will grow old. He does not know the people he will love, the people he will lose, the betrayals he will commit, or the forgiveness he will receive. He does not know that one day he will hold this very photograph and wonder who the child was. Yet the child and the old man are the same person. Or so we believe. There is something mysterious about this continuity. The child has disappeared, and yet he has not disappeared. The old man has become someone the child could not have imagined, and yet he has never ceased to be that child. Perhaps every human life is s...