Karen Armstrong
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 12 - AR Pts: 12
Description
No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. The author's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon...
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"As soon as they became recognizably human, men and women - in their hunger to understand their own presence on earth and the mysteries within and around them - began to worship gods. Karen Armstrong's masterly and illuminating book explores the ways in which the idea and experience of God evolved among the monotheists - Jews, Christians and Muslims." "Weaving a multicolored fabric of historical, philosophical, intellectual and social developments...
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Religious historian Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation, life, and afterlife of history's most powerful book. Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected into one work, and how it became accepted as Christianity's sacred text. She explores how "as the pragmatic scientific ethos of modernity took hold, scripture was read for the information...
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Muhammad was born in 570 CE, and over the following sixty years built a thriving spiritual community, laying the foundations of a religion that changed the course of world history. There is more historical data on his life than on that of the founder of any other major faith, and yet his story is little known. Karen Armstrong's researched biography of Muhammad enables readers to understand the true origins and spirituality of a faith that is all...
Author
Pub. Date
2005
Description
This brilliant, readable synthesis of the history of mythology and the function it serves to humanity is the launch title of the groundbreaking publishing event, The Myths. Human beings have always been mythmakers. So begins Karen Armstrong's concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters, right up to the...
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Description
In this highly personal account of an ex-nun's transition from a cloistered, disciplined life, to a life in the world, confronting her human feelings and making her own decisions, Karen Armstrong discusses frankly and with humor her process of coping with the shifting values and lifestyles of the secular world. It is a revealing account of her discovery that the spiritual vocation can be an ever-changing journey into life. She is author of Beginning...
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Taking as her starting point the teachings of the great world religions, Karen Armstrong demonstrates in twelve practical steps how we can bring compassion to the forefront of our lives. Armstrong argues that compassion is inseparable from humanity, and by transcending the limitations of selfishness on a daily basis we will not only make a difference in the world but also lead happier, more fulfilled, lives.
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Description
Examines how fundamentalism has influenced all of the world's major religions, discussing how it arose as a response to the spiritual crisis of the modern world and focusing on three fundamentalist movements, Protestant fundamentalism in America, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran.
11) The case for God
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Description
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 called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of...
Author
Description
Armstrong begins this spellbinding story of her spiritual journey with her departure in 1969 from the Roman Catholic convent she had entered seven years before--hoping, but failing, to find God. Powerfully engaging, often heartbreaking, but lit with bursts of humor, "The Spiral Staircase" is an extraordinary history of self.
13) Buddha
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Series
Pub. Date
[2001]
Description
A world-renouned religious thinker contemplates one of the world's most sacred figures. In a profound blend of biography, religion, history, and philosophy, Armstrong's highly original portrait of the Buddha explores both the archetypal religious icon and Buddha the man.
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"From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence. For the first time in American history, religious self-identification is on the decline. Some have cited a perception that began to grow after Sept 11: That faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance and divisiveness--something bad for society. But how accurate is that view? And does it apply equally to all faiths?...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
Today the Quran is used by some to justify war and acts of terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception. The significance of Scripture--the holy texts at the centre of all religious traditions--may not be immediately obvious in our secular world but its misunderstanding is perhaps the root cause of most of today's controversies over religion. In this timely...
Author
Pub. Date
[2006]
Description
"In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity,...
Author
Pub. Date
1996.
Description
"The power of Genesis lies in its stories, especially those of the creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. Armstrong traces the grand design of Genesis and its great themes, examines its stories in fascinating detail, and shows why and how they work so well to illustrate the human quest for meaning." "We discover how these ancient tales illuminate our most profound and intractable problems: our struggle with evil, with...