Karen Armstrong
Author
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Formats
Description
Why does God exist? How have the three dominant monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—shaped and altered the conception of God? How have these religions influenced each other? In this stunningly intelligent book, Karen Armstrong, one of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present.
The...
The...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007.
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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
2009.
Language
English
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. While noting that the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level, she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously...
Author
Language
English
Formats
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"A profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life. 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...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Formats
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
Language
English
Formats
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2007.
Physical Desc
240 pages : maps ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
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 too...
Author
Pub. Date
2006.
Physical Desc
469 pages ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
Examines the origins of the religious traditions of the world during the ninth century B.C.E. in four distinct regions--Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2015.
Physical Desc
143 pages ; 22 cm.
Language
English
Description
"A stirring account of the life of Paul, who brought Christianity to the Jews, by the most popular writer on religion in the English-speaking world, Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God, which has been translated into thirty languages"--
19) A history of God
Pub. Date
[2001]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (100 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Language
English
Description
Uses balanced text analysis, archaeological insights, and more to chronicle humanity's elusive quest to know the God at the heart of the world's three great monotheistic religions--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
