Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent 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 attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.

Armstrong received the US$100,000 TED Prize in February 2008. She used that occasion to call for creating a Charter for Compassion, unveiled the following year. Armstrong was born at Wildmoor, Worcestershire, into a family of Irish ancestry who, after her birth, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. In 1962, at the age of 17, she became a member of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching congregation in which she remained for seven years. 

Armstrong says she suffered physical and psychological abuse in the convent; according to an article in The Guardian newspaper, "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 Alfred Tennyson. According to Armstrong, she wrote her dissertation on a topic that the university committee had approved. Nevertheless, it failed her external examiner because 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. Around this time, she was lodged with Jenifer and Herbert Hart, looking after their disabled son, as told in her memoir The Spiral Staircase. Armstrong is unmarried. Although she described herself as a "freelance monotheist," more recently, she said, "I wouldn't even call myself a monotheist anymore. … If anything, I'm a Confucian, I think."

In 1976, Armstrong took a job teaching English at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich while working on a memoir of her convent experiences. This was published in 1982 as Through the Narrow Gate to excellent reviews. That year she embarked on a new career as an independent writer and broadcasting presenter. In 1984, British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a television 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 provided the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work. In A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (1993), she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East to today and discusses Hinduism and Buddhism. As guiding "luminaries" in her approach, Armstrong acknowledges (in The Spiral Staircase and elsewhere) 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. In the year of its publication, Armstrong was invited to choose her eight favorite records for BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs program. She has made several appearances on television, including on Rageh Omaar's program The Life of Muhammad. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. 

She was an advisor for the award-winning PBS-broadcast documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2002), produced by Unity Productions Foundation. In 2007 the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore invited Armstrong to deliver the MUIS Lecture. Armstrong is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars and laypeople who 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 and 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 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 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. In 2012, the Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue recognized her outstanding achievement in advancing understanding about and among world religions and promoting compassion as a way of life. During her award residency in Canada, Armstrong gave the "State of the Charter for Compassion Global Address" and co-launched a compassionate cities initiative in Vancouver.