Dr. Karen Armstrong is a British author, interested in comparing religions and Islam. She has written many books on religious issues, including: The History of God, The Battle of God, Holy War, Islam: A Brief History, The Great Transformation, and others. She will soon publish another book in English under the title: Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. I also wrote two stories: Through the Narrow Gate, and the Spiral Staircase. Her works have been translated into more than fifty languages.
Dr. Karen addressed members of the US Congress on three occasions, lectured policy makers in the US State Department and the Ministry of Defense, participated in the World Economic Forum, is the ambassador of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, and gives many lectures in Muslim countries, especially in Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey and Indonesia.
In 2007, the Egyptian government awarded her a medal in appreciation of her efforts in serving Islam, under the auspices of Al-Azhar, and she is the first foreigner to receive this medal. She won the Four Freedoms Medal for Freedom of Worship from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and the Dr. Leopold Lukas Award at the University of Tübingen in 2009. In 2013, she was the first to receive the Nayef Al-Roudhan Award from the British Academy in recognition of her efforts in developing relations between cultures of the world. The Gandhi/King/Ikeda Award for Community Builders in Atlanta Commemoration in 2014. She is Curator of the British Museum and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Letters.
In February 2008, she received a TED Prize for her vision of the Charter for Compassion (www.charterforcompassion.org) prepared by a group of distinguished thinkers from across the six world faiths as a collaborative effort to restore compassionate thinking and compassion to the moral and political life. The Charter of Compassion is being implemented creatively and realistically in a number of countries, cities, schools and religious communities around the world.
Buddha book pdf by Karen Armstrong
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.