SIMON PHIPPS

My youngest son has now reached the age where we can start to go on walks as a family. So far we have made several trips up to the moors and countryside.  Whenever we go for one of these walks we always have a destination in mind, a goal , whether that be a certain rock or waterfall. We set our sights on this and get walking. We realised quite quickly that this is not the approach taken by our youngest child.  He has no interest in the end goal but instead is interested in everything else around him . We often have long excursions in the same area jumping in puddles or exploring plants. Many times we have had to trace our steps back to a place that he found particularly interesting. Initially this is frustrating for us because we want to get to our destination but before long we find ourselves enraptured in the same things he is, exploring the beauty around us . This can be seen as an analogy for modern life.  We all have destinations tha...

I have often struggled to find beauty in certain things. When I moved to Yorkshire I found it difficult to appreciate the darkness of the buildings, charred black by years of smoke from the factories. Now I find the buildings beautiful, wrapped up in so much history and set into the landscape of rugged moorland. I have a friend who challenges me greatly in seeing the beauty in things.  The latest two areas he has challenged me in are working men's clubs and brutalist architecture , two things I disliked strongly until recently. When speaking to me about them he draws me in with all that these structures represent to him. I feel his passion when he speaks. I am drawn into the deep sense of meaning that they carry within history and the formation of peoples. I recently read ViktorFrankl 's ' Man's Search For Meaning ', one of the main things that struck me was when Viktor wrote about how during his times in the concentration camps he,...

The ending to Mark’s Gospel is one of the most curious parts of the New Testament.  It is like missing the last chapter of a good novel you are reading, or not being able to complete that puzzle you’ve been working on for the last month.  It leaves something to be desired. The women arrive at the tomb only to find it empty. An angel tells them Jesus has risen, and tasks them with going and telling what has happened, instead they run away and the story ends. It looks like early readers of the gospel felt the same way about it’s ending. If you look in your bibles you will see two additional endings attached after the original ending of Mark’s Gospel: the shorter ending, and the longer ending. Unhappy with the ending the early churches added in these two additional endings. The official ending of Mark’s Gospel ends on verse 8 of chapter 16 . New Testament Scholars have come up with various solutions as to why the gospel ends this way, with one o...