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Karen Armstrong (born 14 November 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire, England) is an author, feminist and writer on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. She was born into a family with Irish roots who after her birth moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham.
Biography From 1962 to 1969, Karen Armstrong was a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. This was a teaching order, and once she had advanced from postulant and novice to professed nun, she was sent to St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she studied English. Armstrong left the order during her course of study. After graduating, she embarked on a doctorate (still at Oxford) on Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She continued to work on it while later teaching at the University of London, but her thesis was rejected by an external examiner. She eventually left academia without completing her doctorate. This period was marked by ill-health (Armstrong's life-long, but at that time undiagnosed, epilepsy as described in The Spiral Staircase (2004)) and her readjustment to outside life. In 1976, she became an English teacher at a girls' school in Dulwich, but her epilepsy caused her to miss too many school days, and she was asked to leave in 1981. Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate in 1982, which described the restricted and narrow life she experienced in the convent (and earned her the enmity of many British Catholics). In 1984 she was asked to write and present a documentary on the life of St. Paul. The research for the documentary made Armstrong look again at religion, despite having abandoned religious worship after she left the convent. She has since become a prolific, acclaimed, and controversial writer on subjects touching on all of the three major monotheistic religions. In 1999, the Islamic Center of Southern California honored Armstrong, for "promoting understanding among faiths." Armstrong has written a number of articles for The Guardian. Her latest book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, was published in March 2006; her next book, a revision of her biography of Muhammad, is scheduled for the fall of 2006 from Atlas Books/HarperCollins. In 2006 she appeared on Radio 4 desert island discs. She also made commentaries on the documentary 'The Fundamentalists'. Theory of religious fundamentalism Armstrong has advanced a counter-intuitive theory of religious fundamentalism, key to understanding the movements as they emerged in the late fifteenth and twentieth centuries.
Beliefs Armstrong is a prolific scholar of religions and she has written on a multitude of faiths. She described her beliefs in a C-Span interview in 2000: I usually describe myself, perhaps flippantly, as a freelance monotheist. I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham. I can't see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth, any one of them as superior to any of the others. Each has its own particular genius and each its own particular pitfalls and Achilles' heels. But recently, I've just written a short life story of the Buddha, and I've been enthralled by what he has to say about spirituality, about the ultimate, about compassion and about the necessary loss of ego before you can encounter the divine. And all the great traditions are, in my view, saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences.* Bibliography | ||||||||
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