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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.