Karen Armstrong is the author of 22 books on the world’s religions. A former Roman Catholic nun, she has become a full-time historian and one of the world’s leading commentators on the world’s major religions. I’ve now read 10 of her books. (For her books I've read, click on her name.)

Karen Armstrong’s work has been translated into 45 languages. The respect her work has earned is well deserved for its high quality and thorough historical research. She has addressed members of Congress; lectured to policy makers; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordon, and Davos; addressed the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is often invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. Among other awards, in 2008 she won a $100,000 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize to launch a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

This book’s jacket provides this concise summary: “Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it calls by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Chinese spirituality, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors? Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood”.”

After the Introduction, the book is organized in two parts. PART I – The Unknown God (30,000 BCE to 1500 CE) – has six chapters: Ch 1 is Homo Religiosus; Ch 2 is God; Ch 3 is Reason; Ch 4 is Faith; Ch 5 is Silence; and Ch 6 is Faith and Reason. PART II – The Modern God (1500 CE to the present) – also has six chapters: Ch 7 is Science and Religion; Ch 8 is Scientific Religion; Ch 9 is Enlightenment; Ch 10 is Atheism; Ch 11 is Unknowing; and Ch 12 is Death of God? [Her answer is a definite No!]

From the Introduction: “People of faith admit in theory that God is utterly transcendent, but they seem sometimes to assume ‘they’ know exactly who ‘he’ is and what he thinks, loves, and expects. We tend to tame and domesticate God’s ‘otherness’.” …”But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive.” …”Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book.” …”People who acquired this knack [practical discipline] discovered a transcendent dimension of life that was not simply an external reality ‘out there’ but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality, which they have called God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life.” …”In the first part of this book, I have tried to show how people thought about God in the premodern world in a way that, I hope, throws light on some of the issues that people now find problematic – scripture, inspiration, creation, miracles, revelation, faith, belief, and mystery – as well as showing how religion goes wrong. In the second part, I trace the rise of the ‘modern God’, which overturned so many traditional religious presuppositions.” …”There is a long religious tradition that stressed the importance of recognizing the limits of our knowledge, of silence, reticence, and awe. That is what I hope to explore in this book.”

The topics in PART I discuss religious concepts, many of which originally had different meanings than they are given today. Two important ones are the Greek words ‘logos’ (reason, logical, scientific thought) and ‘pistis’ (trust, loyalty, commitment). Christians capitalize logos, use it for Jesus and change pistis to mean faith (as in belief). She uses Greek words to remind the reader of the original concept when she is discussing a particular time in history – this made her 8-pp Glossary very useful in alerting the reader to the appropriate concept. Other important words like ‘apophatic’ (speechless) and ‘kenosis’ (emptying of self; dismantling egotism) may be new words for some readers. (I used the Glossary often, as it kept me thinking of concepts in the right context.) Ch 5 – Silence – discusses the stage in religious thought where words are inadequate, reducing theologians or philosophers of that time speechless; Ch 6 discusses the times when they saw no conflicts between faith and reason.

But the era during which faith and reason were companions was brought to an end, mainly by the growth of science, in particular realization that planets revolved about the sun, not the Earth. The chapter titles of Part II give hints as to their contents. In each chapter of this book Karen Armstrong discusses, without bias and in adequate depth, the ideas of the various theologians and philosophers of their era. But there are two exceptions where she speaks much more sharply about issues. One is atheism, for which she sees two types. The first were those, philosophers and others, who calmly debated with theologians about religion; they served to help theologians focus on the weak points of their theologies. The second are those scientists who have recently been very aggressive in their denial of God - her anger comes through when she notes, as have others, the simple-minded type of religion they set up as ‘straw-men’ or false idols to refute. The other exception is fundamentalist movements. Here she does not even try to speak with detachment. “Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in profound fear. For Dixon and his conservative Protestant colleagues, who were about to establish the first fundamentalist movement of modern times, it was a religious variation of the widespread malaise that followed the Great War, and it made them distort the tradition they were trying to defend.” She says they “take the debate beyond the realm of logic and dispassionate discussion,” which is “a persistent feature of fundamentalist movements,” whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim. Her strong words on the harm to religion by fundamentalist movements have strengthened since she wrote The Battle for God (book 9) in 2000.

Her Epilogue restates much from the Introduction but also adds valuable insights. “All faith systems have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august, because it lies beyond words and concepts.” …”Idolatry has always been one of the pitfalls of monotheism. Because its chief symbol of the divine is a personalized deity, there is an inherent danger that people would imagine ‘him’ as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they could use to endorse their own ideas, loves, and hatreds – sometimes to lethal effect.” …”Religious truth has always developed communally and orally; in the past, when two or three sat down together and reached out towards the ‘other’, they experienced transcendence as a ‘presence’ among them.” …”There is much to be learned from older ways of thinking about religion. We have seen that far from regarding revelation as static, fixed, and unchanging, Jews, Christians, ad Muslims all knew that revealed truth was symbolic, that scripture could not be interpreted literally, and that sacred texts had multiple meanings, and could lead to fresh insights.” …”Above all, the habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule ‘all day and every day’ demands perpetual ‘kenosis’.” …”From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals, and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfill their humanity.”

I found this book to be as deeply insightful and informative as I found her recent book The Great Transformation: the Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (book 225) in 2007. I give this superb book by Karen Armstrong my very highest recommendation. Think six stars!