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 Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts pdf by Karen Armstrong
In our increasingly secular world, holy texts are at best seen as irrelevant, and at worst as an excuse to incite violence, hatred and division. So what value, if any, can scripture hold for us today? And if our world no longer seems compatible with scripture, is it perhaps because its original purpose has become lost?
Today we see the Quran being used by some to justify war and terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception. The holy texts at the centre of all religious traditions are often employed selectively to underwrite arbitrary and subjective views. They are believed to be divinely ordained; they are claimed to contain eternal truths.
But as Karen Armstrong, a world authority on religious affairs, shows in this fascinating journey through millennia of history, this narrow reading of scripture is a relatively recent phenomenon. For hundreds of years these texts were instead viewed as spiritual tools: scripture was a means for the individual to connect with the divine, to transcend their physical existence, and to experience a higher level of consciousness. Holy texts were seen as fluid and adaptable, rather than a set of binding archaic rules or a ‘truth’ that has to be ‘believed’.
Armstrong argues that only by rediscovering an open engagement with their holy texts will the world’s religions be able to curtail arrogance, intolerance and violence. And if scripture is used to engage with the world in more meaningful and compassionate ways, we will find that it still has a great deal to teach us.