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...

In an experiment conducted in 2011, participants created Origami in a bid to assess the validity of “The IKEA Effect” – that people place a greater value on things that they have created , or expended effort on, than on things that were pre-built, or build by someone else, even if the pre-made items were of a higher quality. The participants created either an origami crane or frog, and were then asked how much they would pay for it. A group of experts also created origami. A group of non-participants were asked how much they would pay for the non-expert and expert origami. The participants assessed their own work at around 23 cents , whilst the non-participants assessed the same origami at around 5 cents . Finally the non-participants assessed the experts origami at around 27 cents . From this we can see that the participants assessed their own work (basically scrunched up paper) as being almost the same value as the origami that the experts made,...

A little while ago I listened to a podcast about Friedrich Nietzsche’s book " The Birth of Tragedy " . The speaker was discussing Nietzsche’s love of   Greek Tragedy . A form of play from over 2000 years ago that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, pulled back the veil of reality to give the viewer a glimpse of the chaos that lay behind. Greek Tragedy revealed the ultimate reality that life is meaningless , and that we are but froth tossed about on a cosmic ocean . Nietzche argued that art (in this case in the form of a play) created a safe way for people to explore this complete lack of meaning and total chaos in reality. Nietzsche hated the movement towards Platonism that took place just over 2000 years ago that believed that some kind of order lay behind life. Often times so much of life seems like random chaos . So much of life seems meaningless, and we are left to stare into the abyss, stare into the chasm that is left by so many tragic events. We ...

I first heard about the Abundance mindset whilst reading Stephen Coveys book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” . I love this book and have received a lot from the models and advice found within – including the abundance mindset. What is the abundance mindset? The Abundance mindset is often contrasted with the Scarcity mindset – the idea that there is a shortage of everything. If there is a cake, and lots of people want to eat it, then there will be no cake left for me, therefore I must get there before everyone else and take as much of the cake as possible. The abundance mindset is the opposite of this. If there is a cake, then there is enough for everybody, therefore I don’t need to fight others for it or be underhanded, we can all have a slice. We can see the merits of this model. It essentially says, “You don’t have to climb over others to get ahead, you don’t have to be underhanded, it doesn’t have to be dog eat dog, we can work together and produce ...

In a curious story found within Mark’s Gospel (Mark 3:20-22), we see Jesus teaching within a house. Two separate groups of people approach Jesus in what is known as a ‘ Markan Sandwich ’. The first group is Jesus' parents. They claim that Jesus has lost his mind , and they have come to “take charge of Him” (in other words, to remove Him forcibly from that place). The second group is a selection of officials from Jerusalem with a charge against Jesus, that of demonic possession (a charge which, if verified, would lead to either exile or execution). The similarity between these two encounters: labelling. The reason that the two parties believe that they have the right to forcibly remove, exile, or execute Jesus is because they have placed a label upon Him. Either insane or possessed . Labels In life, we are often guilty of this same fallacy. We are able to exclude people, marginalise people, and reject people because we have placed a label on them – a...