Lionel Blue
Lionel Blue
Lionel Blueis a British Reform rabbi, journalist and broadcaster. He was the first British rabbi publicly to declare his homosexuality...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth6 February 1930
christian ghetto shame
I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.
christian poison
This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.
dance mother modern-woman
My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.
falling-in-love fall lovers
I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.
gay nervous sexuality
I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.
christian use affair
The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.
religious book class
At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.
christian giving political
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
birthday enemy wish
To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
though
I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.
Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.
good referring
Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.
based lives manifest speaking themselves
The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.
testament
Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.