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.
The Case for God pdf by Karen Armstrong
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. And 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 polarized age. 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.”