Author Bio
• Birth—November 14,1944
• Where—Wildmoor, Worcestershire, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in London, England
Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She would become disillusioned and leave the convent in 1969.
Armstrong first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.
In February, 2008, she received a $100,000 TED Prize. She used that occasion to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.
Early life
Armstrong was born into a family of Irish ancestry who, after her birth, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. In 1962, at the age of 18, she became a member of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching congregation, in which she remained for seven years. Armstrong claims she suffered physical and psychological abuse in the convent, according to The Guardian newspaper:
But the sisters ran a cruel regime. Armstrong was required to mortify her flesh with whips and wear a spiked chain around her arm. When she spoke out of turn, she claims she was forced to sew at a treadle machine with no needle for a fortnight.
Once she had advanced from postulant and novice to professed nun, she enrolled in St Anne's College, Oxford, to study English. Armstrong left her order in 1969 while still a student at Oxford. After graduating with a Congratulatory First, she embarked on a DPhil on the poet Tennyson. According to Armstrong, she wrote her dissertation on a topic that had been approved by the university committee.
Nevertheless it was failed by her external examiner on the grounds that the topic had been unsuitable. Armstrong did not formally protest this verdict, nor did she embark upon a new topic but instead abandoned hope of an academic career. She reports that this period in her life was marked by ill-health stemming from her lifelong but, at that time, still undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy.
Career
In 1976, Armstrong took a job as teaching English at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich while working on a memoir of her convent experiences. This was published in 1982 to excellent reviews as Through the Narrow Gate. That same year she embarked on a new career as an independent writer and broadcasting presenter.
In 1984, the British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a TV documentary on the life of St. Paul, The First Christian, a project that involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the steps of the saint. Armstrong described this visit as a "breakthrough experience" that defied her prior assumptions and was the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work.
In A History of God (1993), she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East up to the present day and also discusses Hinduism and Buddhism. As guiding "luminaries" in her approach, Armstrong acknowledges the late Canadian theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Protestant minister, and the Jesuit father Bernard Lonergan. In 1996, she published Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths.
Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006) continues the themes covered in A History of God and examines the emergence and codification of the world's great religions during the so-called Axial age, identified by Karl Jaspers. As a result of her body of work, she has made considerable appearances on television, including appearances on Rageh Omaar's program, The Life of Muhammad. She was also an advisor for the award-winning, PBS-broadcast documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2002), produced by Unity Productions Foundation.
In 2007, Armstrong was invited by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore to deliver the MUIS Lecture.
Armstrong is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars and laypeople that attempts to investigate the historical foundations of Christianity. She has written numerous articles for The Guardian and other publications. She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers' popular PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the United States Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN's first ever session on religion. She is a vice-president of the British Epilepsy Association, otherwise known as Epilepsy Action.
Armstrong, who has taught courses at Leo Baeck College, a rabbinical college and center for Jewish education located in north London, says she has been particularly inspired by the Jewish tradition's emphasis on practice as well as faith:
I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's about what you do. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.
She maintains that religious fundamentalism is not just a response to, but is a product of contemporary culture and for this reason concludes that,
We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.
Awarded the $100,000 TED Prize in February 2008, Armstrong called for drawing up a Charter for Compassion, in the spirit of the Golden Rule, to identify shared moral priorities across religious traditions, in order to foster global understanding and a peaceful world. It was presented in Washington, D.C. in November 2009. Signatories include Queen Noor of Jordan, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Paul Simon.
Armstrong has been called "a prominent and prolific religious historian" and described as "arguably the most lucid, wide-ranging and consistently interesting religion writer today." She is a regular speaker on the Abrahamic tradition, and after the September 11 attacks she was in great demand as a lecturer, pleading for inter-faith dialogue.
Criticism
Atheist activist Sam Harris criticizes Armstrong's "benign" view of Islam, contending that "Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society." Harris is also strongly critical of Armstrong's "religious apology" of Islamic fundamentalism, accusing her and like-minded scholars of "political correctness."
Armstrong has also attracted the criticism of Christian philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig. Craig has criticized Armstrong's "anti-realist" views about statements concerning God, particularly her assertion that "'God' is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence." Craig argues that Armstrong's view of God as ineffable is "self-refuting" and "logically incoherent.
Honors
1999 - Media Award, Muslin Public Affairs Council
2000 - Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize, University of Tübingen
2006 - Doctor of Letters, Aston University
2008 - TED Prize
2008 - Freedom of Worship Award, Roosevelt Institute
2011 - Nationalencyklopedin's International Knowledge Award
2011 - Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of St. Andrews
2014 - Honorary Doctor of Divinity, McGill University
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/5/2014.)