Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong OBE FRSLis a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She became disillusioned and left the convent in 1969. She first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 November 1944
love biblical hatred
Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.
queens children war
We talk about God as though he was like a somebody. We ask him to bless our nation, or save our Queen, or give us a fine day for the picnic. And we actually expect him to be on our side in an election or war even though our opponents are also God's children.
christian war fighting
Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.
people together tasks
The great task of our time is to build a global society, where people can live together in peace
reality compassion peaceful
If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life.
thinking our-world mind
I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.
pain reality common
Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.
compassion church doctrine
The early doctrines of the church, even doctrines like Trinity and Incarnation were originally also calls for action, calls for selflessness, calls for compassion, and unless you live that out compassionately, selflessly, you didn't understand what the doctrine was saying.
darkness ascent height
there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
school compassion people
[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
religious giving selfishness
And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.
believe fall games
Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place.
years golden firsts
The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
democracy united-states not-friends
Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.