I Am the Work

Karen Armstrong has written a number of fascinating treatises on the spiritual in human history—the nature and purpose of religion itself. In her newest she looks at how God has been changed by our modern world, and how this new God seems to serve so many people so poorly that they’ve eschewed him/her/it.

I like Karen Armstrong, mostly because she brings so much reasoned and questioning intelligence to a topic that has far too many bleaters. Here is the long version of the blurb I wrote for Daedalus, based mostly on the publisher’s own:

Moving from the cave paintings at Lascaux to modern fundamentalism, the author of The History of God and The Great Transformation here details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality—known by such names as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao—and then wonders why so many today want nothing to do with God, or question the efficacy of faith.

Why has God become unbelievable? And why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?

In Karen Armstrong’s superbly lucid argument, she cautions that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; the task of religion, rather, 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.” Daedalus is offering this first edition with a bookplate signed by Karen Armstrong.

“Karen Armstrong is one of [a] handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion,” writes Alain de Botton in London’s Observer. “As in so much of the rest of her hugely impressive body of work, [she] invites us on a journey through religion that helps us to rescue what remains wise from so much that to so many … no longer seems true.”