I stumbled into quite a rabbit hole this week when I was looking for the origins and meaning of the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” While many attribute this to Aristotle, it turns out he said something like this – “Concerning the challenge we just faced about how to describe things in numbers and definitions, what is the reason for a unity/oneness? For however many things have a plurality of parts and are not merely a complete aggregate but instead

I remember it as clear as if it was yesterday even though it was close to forty years ago now. I can see myself standing in the kitchen of my second-floor subsidized block apartment. I had grown weary of the monthly drive several towns over to the county Social Security Administration office where I would justify my worthiness to receive food stamps. There I would present my tallied income from waitressing at a local breakfast and lunch diner, the morning paper route, and t

Photo by Rev. Jessica Clay. A month or so ago when I first began to conceive of what my July sermons might contain, I thought about freedom given the holiday weekend. I thought I might explore the meaning of that in light of so much talk about individual freedoms – freedom from what, freedom to what, freedom for what? And perhaps I will wind my way back around to that as I write, but suffice it to say that in the intervening time life has happened and calls me to respond.