Building Jerusalem: A Portrait of My Father

by Alan Bullock (Author), Alan Bullock (Author)

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  Frank Allen Bullock was born in March 1887 on the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire, the son of a signalman on the Great Western Railway. He left school at 13 and became a gardener, a craft at which he excelled. But he continued his education by spending what money he could spare on buying second-hand copies of Carlyle, Macaulay, Froude and whatever else he could find or borrow, and in early manhood he discovered a talent for speaking. After a brief involvement wirh Liberal politics, he decided to become a Unitarian minister. In 1926, Bullock was appointed minister of the Unitarian Church at Bradford in Yorkshire, where he lived for the rest of his life, and where he preached virtually every Sunday until his death in 1964. Eventually, he became for a year President of the General Assemby of the Liberal and Free Christian Churches in Britain. This book distils and summarizes the remarkable and highly individual religious thought - from the Buddhist, Hindu and mystic as well as Christian traditions - which Bullock worked out and presented in his sermons. But it also draws on the many series of lectures that he gave contemporaneously on psychology, literature and the arts, which evolved in their course a unified view of man, his spritual nature, the crisis of the 20th century and the possibility of life fulfilled. No spiritual or intellectual tradition was alien to him; he believed that the answers which the different traditions gave to the perennial questions that men and women ask themselves tend in the same direction. The passion with which he preached and taught are clearly visible in this book from his own words.