Karen Armstrong Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Beginning the World | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The First Christian | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Gospel According to Woman | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Holy War | (1988) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century | (1991) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The End of Silence | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A History of God | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Visions of God | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Jerusalem | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
In the Beginning | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Shifting Ground and Cultural Bodies | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Battle for God | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Faith After 11 September | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Great Transformation | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Case for God | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to The Hebrews | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Letter To Pakistan | (2011) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Fields of Blood | (2014) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Lost Art of Scripture | (2019) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Sacred Nature | (2022) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Story Of God | (2022) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Biographies & Memoirs
Through the Narrow Gate | (1981) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time | (1991) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Buddha | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Spiral Staircase | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Books That Changed the World Books
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Qur'an: A Biography | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Plato's Republic | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
On The Wealth of Nations | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Bible | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Qur'an | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Darwin's Origin of Species | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Plato's Republic | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Clausewitz's on War | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Marx's Das Kapital | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Canongate's The Myths Books
A Short History of Myth | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Penelopiad | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Weight | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Helmet of Horror | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Where Three Roads Meet | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Binu and the Great Wall | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Goddess Chronicle | (2013) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Eminent Lives Books
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time | (1991) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
George Balanchine | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Beethoven | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Thomas Jefferson | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Caravaggio | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Alexander the Great | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Freud | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Francis Crick | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Alexis de Tocqueville | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Shakespeare | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Machiavelli | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
George Washington | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Icons Books
Jesus | (2013) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Edgar Allan Poe | (2014) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Van Gogh | (2014) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
St Paul | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Modern Library Chronicles Books
California | (1980) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Communism | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
London | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Balkans | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The German Empire | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Catholic Church | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Peoples and Empires | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Hitler and the Holocaust | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Law in America | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The American Revolution | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Americas | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe 1944-45 | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Reformation | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Company | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Age of Shakespeare | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Age of Napoleon | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Evolution | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Nazism and War | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The City | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Short History of Medicine | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Storm from the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World & the Christian West | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Baseball | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Hellenistic Age | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Renaissance | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Islam | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Christian World | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Romantic Revolution | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Korean War | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Anthologies
Tongues of Fire | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Changing Face of God | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
God at 2000 | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books about comparative religion. She was born November 14, 1944 at Wildmoor, Worcestershire into a family who, after she was born, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham.
In the year 1962, when she was 17 years old, she became a member of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching congregation, in which she stayed in for seven years. Karen says that she suffered psychological and physical abuse in the convent. She was required to wear a spiked chain around her arm and mortify her flesh with whips. When she spoke out of turn, she says that she was forced to sew at this treadle machine without a needle for a fortnight.
Once Karen had advanced from postulant and novice to professed nun, she enrolled in St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in order to study English. Armstrong left her order in the year 1969 while she was still a student at Oxford.
After she graduated with a Congratulatory First, she embarked on a DPhil on the poet Alfred Tennyson. She wrote her dissertation on a topic which was approved by the university committee. Nevertheless, it got failed by her external examiner on the grounds that her topic was unsuitable. She didn’t formally protest the verdict, nor did she work on a new topic but abandoned hope of an academic career instead. Karen says that this part of her life was marked by ill health stemming from her lifelong yet, at this time, still undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy.
In 1976, she took a teaching job at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich in the English department as she worked on a memoir of her convent experiences, which was published in 1982 as “Through the Narrow Gate”.
That same year, she embarked on a new career as a broadcasting presenter and independent writer. Then in 1984, the British Channel Four hired her to write and present a television documentary on the life of St. Paul, the First Christian, a project which involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the saint’s steps. Karen describes this visit as a breakthrough experience which defied her prior assumptions and gave her the inspiration for virtually all of her subsequent work.
She is unmarried. And although she was once a self described ‘freelance monotheist’, she began to later feel like a Confucian, more than anything.
In 2008, she was awarded the $100,000 TED Prize and started working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, crafted by leading thinkers in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, and created online by the general public. Also in 2008, Karen was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In the year 2013, she got the British Academy’s inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Trans cultural Understanding.
“A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” is a non-fiction book that was released in 1993. Karen’s superbly readable exploration of just how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force.
Armstrong traces the history of how women and men have experienced and perceived God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From medieval mysticism and classical philosophy to the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and the modern age of skepticism. She performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into a single compelling volume.
“The Case for God” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2001. Karen Armstrong, while moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, details the great lengths to which mankind has gone to in order to experience this sacred reality which is called by many names like Nirvana, Brahman, Dao, God, or Allah.
Focusing particularly on Christianity but including Chinese, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism spiritualities, she examines the diminished impulse toward religion during our own time, when a significant number of people either question the efficacy of faith or want nothing to do with God. Why has God become something so unbelievable? Why is it that theists and atheists alike now speak and think about God in such a way that veers so profoundly from our ancestors’ way of thinking?
Answering such questions with the same profound insight and depth of knowledge which marked all of her acclaimed books, Karen makes it clear how the changing face of the world has also necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the individual and societal level. She also makes a powerful and convincing argument for drawing upon the insights of the past so that a faith can be built which speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age.
But she still cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide us answers which lie inside of the competence of human reason, this is the role of logos, she tells us. Religion’s task is to help us live more peacefully, creatively, and even joyously with realities that we don’t have easy explanations for. She also emphasizes too, that religion is not going to work automatically. It is just as practical as its insights are derived not from abstract speculation however from ‘dedicated intellectual endeavor’ and is a compassionate lifestyle which enables us to break free of the prism of selfhood.
“The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2004. Karen Armstrong entered a convent in order to meet God. After spending seven savagely unhappy years as a nun, she left her order so she could pursue English literature at Oxford. However convent life had altered her profoundly, and coping with the outside world and her own expiring faith proved to be excruciating.
Her horrifying illness and deep solitude marked her forever as an outsider. And in her own mind she was a total failure: as an academic, as a nun, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future appeared to be in question until she stumbled across comparative theology. What she discovered, in thinking, in learning, and writing about other religions, was the transcendence and ecstasy that she’d never felt as a nun.
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