From one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, a profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature--and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life.

Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change.... But Armstrong's book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet. --The Guardian

Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred.

In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian of religion Karen Armstrong re-sacralizes nature for modern times. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the world's religious traditions, she vividly describes nature's central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature's potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves.

As long as we have been human, we have been mythmakers. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong holds up the mirror of mythology to show us the history of ourselves, and embarks on a journey that begins at a Neanderthal graveside and ends buried in the heart of the modern novel.

Surprising, powerful and profound, A Short History of Myth examines the world's most ancient art form - the making and telling of stories - and why we still need it.

The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A nuanced exploration of the role of religion in our lives, drawing on insights of the past to build a faith for our dangerously polarized age--from the New York Times bestselling author of The History of God

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 people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?

Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations. She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from dedicated intellectual endeavor and a compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.

With such bestsellers as A History of God and Islam, Karen Armstrong has consistently delivered penetrating, readable, and prescient (The New York Times) works that have lucidly engaged a wide range of religions and religious issues. In Buddha she turns to a figure whose thought is still reverberating throughout the world 2,500 years after his death.

Many know the Buddha only from seeing countless serene, iconic images. But what of the man himself and the world he lived in? What did he actually do in his roughly eighty years on earth that spawned one of the greatest religions in world history? Armstrong tackles these questions and more by examining the life and times of the Buddha in this engrossing philosophical biography. Against the tumultuous cultural background of his world, she blends history, philosophy, mythology, and biography to create a compelling and illuminating portrait of a man whose awakening continues to inspire millions.

One of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world--and the bestselling author of such acclaimed books as A History of God, Islam, and Buddha--now gives us a thoughtful, and thought-provoking book that can help us make the world a more compassionate place.

Karen Armstrong believes that while compassion is intrinsic in all human beings, each of us needs to work diligently to cultivate and expand our capacity for compassion. Here, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life.

The twelve steps Armstrong suggests begin with Learn About Compassion and close with Love Your Enemies. In between, she takes up compassion for yourself, mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and concern for everybody. She suggests concrete ways of enhancing our compassion and putting it into action in our everyday lives, and provides, as well, a reading list to encourage us to hear one another's narratives. Throughout, Armstrong makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two.

At a very young age, Karen experienced seeing entities that had crossed over to the other side. She put away those gifts for many years because she wanted to be normal. Then her spiritual experiences grew exponentially when she became a mother, lost her own mother, and then became divorced. After the death of Karen's mother, she became more interested in her gifts and wanted to contact her mother in the spiritual realm. She spoke to her mom through a medium, who also told her she was psychic. Karen was told she would use her gifts one day to heal others. Karen started to meditate and contact her own angels and guides. It was during these experiences that Karen came to know the spirit world through her own angel eyes and release the fears of not fitting in. Every time a fear was released through a specific healing modality, Karen became closer to finding her own soul path. She even had famous people show up in her medium readings such as Edgar Cayce and Archangel Metatron! These awe-inspiring visits made her realize she had an important job to do on earth! Each chapter deals with releasing a fear through a story, dream, or a mediumship reading. The author provides helpful advice for releasing these fears and improving your life.

In the late twentieth century, fundamentalism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces at work in the world, contesting the dominance of modern secular values and threatening peace and harmony around the globe. Yet it remains incomprehensible to a large number of people. In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong brilliantly and sympathetically shows us how and why fundamentalist groups came into existence and what they yearn to accomplish.

We see the West in the sixteenth century beginning to create an entirely new kind of civilization, which brought in its wake change in every aspect of life -- often painful and violent, even if liberating. Armstrong argues that one of the things that changed most was religion. People could no longer think about or experience the divine in the same way; they had to develop new forms of faith to fit their new circumstances.

Armstrong characterizes fundamentalism as one of these new ways of being religious that have emerged in every major faith tradition. Focusing on Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran, she examines the ways in which these movements, while not monolithic, have each sprung from a dread of modernity -- often in response to assault (sometimes unwitting, sometimes intentional) by the mainstream society.

Armstrong sees fundamentalist groups as complex, innovative, and modern -- rather than as throwbacks to the past -- but contends that they have failed in religious terms. Maintaining that fundamentalism often exists in symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity, each impelling the other on to greater excess, she suggests compassion as a way to defuse what is now an intensifying conflict.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

The New York Times bestselling author of A History of God skillfully narrates the history of the Crusades with a view toward their profound and continuing influence.

Holy War brings compassion, objectivity, breadth, and imagination to the most urgent crisis of our time. --The Boston Phoenix

In 1095 Pope Urban II summoned Christian warriors to take up the cross and reconquer the Holy Land. Thus began the holy wars that would focus the power of Europe against a common enemy and become the stuff of romantic legend. In reality the Crusades were a series of rabidly savage conflicts in the name of piety. And, as Armstrong demonstrates in this fascinating book, their legacy of religious violence continues today in the Middle East, where the age-old conflict of Christians, Jews, and Muslims persists.

Through the Narrow Gate is Karen Armstrong's intimate memoir of life inside a Catholic convent. With refreshing honesty and clarity, the book takes readers on a revelatory adventure that begins with Armstrong's decision in the course of her spiritual training offers a fascinating view into a shrouded religious life, and a vivid, moving account of the spiritual coming age of one of our most loved and respected interpreters of religious.

A book that shines fresh light on the world's major religions to help us build bridges between faiths and rediscover a creative and spiritual engagement with holy texts--from the New York Times bestselling author of A History of God

[An] unusual, often dazzling, blend of theology, history, and neuroscience --The New Yorker

The significance of scripture may not be immediately obvious in our secular world, but its misunderstanding is perhaps the root cause of many of today's controversies. The sacred texts have been co-opted by fundamentalists, who insist that they must be taken literally, and by others who interpret scripture to bolster their own prejudices. These texts are seen to prescribe ethical norms and codes of behavior that are divinely ordained: they are believed to contain eternal truths. But as Karen Armstrong shows in this chronicle of the development and significance of major religions, such a narrow, peculiar reading of scripture is a relatively recent, modern phenomenon. For most of their history, the world's religious traditions have regarded these texts as tools that enable the individual to connect with the divine, to experience a different level of consciousness, and to help them engage with the world in more meaningful and compassionate ways.

SPLENDID . . . Eminently sane and patient . . . Essential reading for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
--The Washington Post

Venerated for millennia by three faiths, torn by irreconcilable conflict, conquered, rebuilt, and mourned for again and again, Jerusalem is a sacred city whose very sacredness has engendered terrible tragedy. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly praised A History of God, traces the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all laid claim to Jerusalem as their holy place, and how three radically different concepts of holiness have shaped and scarred the city for thousands of years.

Armstrong unfolds a complex story of spiritual upheaval and political transformation--from King David's capital to an administrative outpost of the Roman Empire, from the cosmopolitan city sanctified by Christ to the spiritual center conquered and glorified by Muslims, from the gleaming prize of European Crusaders to the bullet-ridden symbol of the present-day Arab-Israeli conflict.

Written with grace and clarity, the product of years of meticulous research, Jerusalem combines the pageant of history with the profundity of searching spiritual analysis. Like Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Jerusalem is a book for the ages.

THE BEST SERIOUS, ACCESSIBLE HISTORY OF THE MOST SPIRITUALLY IMPORTANT CITY IN THE WORLD.
--The Baltimore Sun

A WORK OF IMPRESSIVE SWEEP AND GRANDEUR.
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

The mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, writes Karen Armstrong, like the astronauts of our own day. They broke into a new religion, blazed a new trail to God and to the depths of the self, a trail far from the beaten pilgrimage paths of Chaucer and Langland. Mysticism is a spiritual mystery shared in some form by all faiths; it has a supernatural quality that extends beyond the given boundaries of religious creed and may be experienced by any lay person. The thrilling intensity of a mystical experience, as represented in this volume by the writings of four mystics of the Middle Ages, can inspire other spiritual seekers with its insight into the limitless wonder of both human and divine experience. Dissatisfied by the strictures of dogma and a religion that failed to quench the human thirst for knowledge of a mystical order, these four mystics--Richard Rolle of Hampole, Walter Hilton, Dame Julian of Norwich, and the unknown author of The Cloud Of Unknowing --communicate an intense and passionate experience of faith rare in any time. Because of their unique beliefs and spiritual strength, their knowledge and writings have proved timeless, and in this beautiful volume show contemporary seekers important new insights into the nature of divine love.

Karen Armstrong is a genius.--A. N. Wilson

As the foundation stone of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, The Book of Genesis unfolds some of the most arresting stories of world literature--the Creation; Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel; the sacrifice of Isaac. Yet the meaning of Genesis remains enigmatic. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly acclaimed bestseller A History of God, brilliantly illuminates the mysteries and profundities of this mystifying work.

A lyrical chronicle of one woman's wrestling with Genesis that can serve as a guide to others . . . As notable for its scholarship as it is for its honesty and vulnerability.--Publishers Weekly

Armstrong can simplify complex ideas, but she is never simplistic.--The New York Times Book Review

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The New York Times bestselling author of A History of God delivers the gripping, inspirational story about her own search for God.

A story about becoming human, being recognized, finally recognizing oneself.... It fills the reader with hope. --The Washington Post Book World

In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness-diagnosed only years later as epilepsy--marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An extraordinary investigation of a critical moment in the evolution of religious thought--from the New York Times bestselling author of A History of God and The Spiral Staircase

A splendid book.... Lucid, highly readable.... Relevant to a world still embroiled in military conflict and sectarian hatreds. --The New York Times

In the ninth century BCE, events in four regions of the civilized world led to the rise of religious traditions that have endured to the present day--development of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Armstrong, one of our most prominent religious scholars, examines how these traditions began in response to the violence of their time. Studying figures as diverse as the Buddha and Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah, Armstrong reveals how these still enduring philosophies can help address our contemporary problems.

A sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence--from the New York Times bestselling author of The History of God - Elegant and powerful.... Both erudite and accurate, dazzling in its breadth of knowledge and historical detail. --The Washington Post

In these times of rising geopolitical chaos, the need for mutual understanding between cultures has never been more urgent. Religious differences are seen as fuel for violence and warfare. In these pages, one of our greatest writers on religion, Karen Armstrong, amasses a sweeping history of humankind to explore the perceived connection between war and the world's great creeds--and to issue a passionate defense of the peaceful nature of faith.

With unprecedented scope, Armstrong looks at the whole history of each tradition--not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Religions, in their earliest days, endowed every aspect of life with meaning, and warfare became bound up with observances of the sacred. Modernity has ushered in an epoch of spectacular violence, although, as Armstrong shows, little of it can be ascribed directly to religion. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions came to absorb modern belligerence--and what hope there might be for peace among believers of different faiths in our time.

RAPED, ABUSED, MOLESTED LEFT TO FIGURE OUT LIFE ON HER OWN.. Unwanted by a prostitute mother, inadequately raised by a schizophrenic aunt with multiple personalities just to name a few of the many incidents that left her on the edge of death throughout her entire upbringing. ALCOHOLIC, A YOUNG MESSY GIRL is what emerges from the pages of Broken For You. BROKEN FOR YOU is a raw look at one woman's journey into finding and remembering her beginning. Broken is a real story for real women, written with an uncommon passion, which can only be found in somebody who is brave enough to tell her story. A SURVIVOR, A WOMAN WHO DELIVERS A MESSAGE FROM HER MESS. Her story is a moving personal history of redemption written both to give thanks to God and to inspire others. Broken For you is the beginning of a story that could not be told in one book. BROKEN FOR YOU is the first of three incredible books that will blow your mind.

'The beautifully quirky title of Karen Armstrong's first collection of poetry maps the final journey of a friend who is dying of cancer. These poems capture the warmth of unselfish love; of a relationship despite trying circumstances. A pact between two friends where one shares the burden vicariously as the other faces debilitating illness and inevitable death.' - Peter F. Pike, Managing Editor, FreeXpresSion

'With unpretentious simplicity and directness, Karen Armstrong conveys the tangled emotions - defiance, confusion, anger, black humour and acquiescence - experienced by two friends confronting one's imminent death. These poems, unified by images of feathers and flight, convey the fragility and lightness of being mortal. They build slowly, without sentimentality, through past memories and present moments towards the inexorable moment of parting when the future must be faced alone. These poems will strike a chord with anyone who has tackled the stony stages of loss.' - Janet Upcher

'This collection of poetry will move you and linger in you long after the vigil is over. It will bring you out from the little black box we keep ourselves tucked into. Armstrong presents the harrowing circumstances as they are with acute sensitivity. The poems are quietly terrifying as they draw us to the bright light of death. They are a potent mix of sorrow and need, an ongoing state of mourning for the poet's friend. This is a book necessary for life. Enjoy this book. It insists.' - Karen Knight

Un extraordinario alegato contra los prejuicios hacia una religión que practican mil doscientos millones de personas en todo el mundo.

La figura de Mahoma (570-632) ha suscitado siempre inacabables controversias en el mundo occidental. Karen Armstrong comienza su libro con un documentado retrato de la situación en que se encontraban las tribus beduinas en la Arabia del siglo VI. En este ambiente, politeísta y desunido políticamente, Mahoma, vivió durante el mes de Ramadán de 610 una experiencia mística que cambió el curso de la historia: el comienzo de las revelaciones que pronto fructificarían en el Corán.

La autora narra los inicios de la nueva religión, el islam, y las disputas teológicas y políticas que desgarraron la vida de numerosas familias de La Meca o de Medina. Mahoma se perfila en estas páginas como un hombre complejo, apasionado, frágil, dotado para la política y fiel a lo que entendía como una misión personal y trascendente.