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| karen armstrong hinduism: The Case for God Karen Armstrong, 2009-09-22 From the bestselling author of A History of God and The Great Transformation comes a balanced, nuanced understanding of the role religion plays in human life and the trajectory of faith in modern times. Why has God become incredible? 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? Moving from the Paleolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the lengths to which humankind has gone to experience a sacred reality that it called God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. She 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. With her trademark depth of knowledge and profound insight, Armstrong elucidates how the changing world has necessarily altered the importance of religion at both societal and individual levels. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for structuring a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: A History of God Karen Armstrong, 2004 A study of the deity of the world's three dominant monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In a dynamic interplay between religion and society's ever-changing beliefs, values, and traditions, human beings' ideas about God have been transformed. Ideas about God have been molded to apply to the spiritual needs of the people who worship him in a particular place and time. The author explores and analyzes the development and progression of the various perceptions of God from the days of Abraham to present times--Adapted from book jacket. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life Karen Armstrong, 2010-12-28 One of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world—and the bestselling author of such acclaimed books as A History of God, Islam, and Buddha—now gives us a thoughtful, and thought-provoking book that can help us make the world a more compassionate place. Karen Armstrong believes that while compassion is intrinsic in all human beings, each of us needs to work diligently to cultivate and expand our capacity for compassion. Here, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life. The twelve steps Armstrong suggests begin with “Learn About Compassion” and close with “Love Your Enemies.” In between, she takes up “compassion for yourself,” mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and “concern for everybody.” She suggests concrete ways of enhancing our compassion and putting it into action in our everyday lives, and provides, as well, a reading list to encourage us to “hear one another’s narratives.” Throughout, Armstrong makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Tongues of Fire Karen Armstrong, 1985 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Fields of Blood Karen Armstrong, 2014-10-28 From the renowned and bestselling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence. For the first time in American history, religious self-identification is on the decline. Some have cited a perception that began to grow after September 11: that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance and divisiveness--something bad for society. But how accurate is that view? And does it apply equally to all faiths? In these troubled times, we risk basing decisions of real and dangerous consequence on mistaken understandings of the faiths subscribed around us, in our immediate community as well as globally. And so, with her deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong examines the impulse toward violence in each of the world's great religions. The comparative approach is new: while there have been plenty of books on jihad or the Crusades, this book lays the Christian and the Islamic way of war side by side, along with those of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism and Judaism. Each of these faiths arose in agrarian societies with plenty of motivation for violence: landowners had to lord it over peasants and warfare was essential to increase one's landholdings, the only real source of wealth before the great age of trade and commerce. In each context, it fell to the priestly class to legitimize the actions of the state. And so the martial ethos became bound up with the sacred. At the same time, however, their ideologies developed that ran counter to the warrior code: around sages, prophets and mystics. Within each tradition there grew up communities that represented a protest against the injustice and violence endemic to agrarian society. This book explores the symbiosis of these 2 impulses and its development as these confessional faiths came of age. The aggression of secularism has often damaged religion and pushed it into a violent mode. But modernity has also been spectacularly violent, and so Armstrong goes on to show how and in what measure religions, in their relative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence--and what hope there might be for peace among believers in our time. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: In the Beginning Karen Armstrong, 2011-08-10 “Karen Armstrong is a genius.”—A. N. Wilson As the foundation stone of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, The Book of Genesis unfolds some of the most arresting stories of world literature—the Creation; Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel; the sacrifice of Isaac. Yet the meaning of Genesis remains enigmatic. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly acclaimed bestseller A History of God, brilliantly illuminates the mysteries and profundities of this mystifying work. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. “A lyrical chronicle of one woman's wrestling with Genesis that can serve as a guide to others . . . As notable for its scholarship as it is for its honesty and vulnerability.”—Publishers Weekly “Armstrong can simplify complex ideas, but she is never simplistic.”—The New York Times Book Review |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Through the Narrow Gate, Revised Karen Armstrong, 2005-02-19 Read and cherished by thousands all over the world since it was first published in 1981, Through the Narrow Gate takes the reader on a spiritual journey that began one September day in 1962 when Karen Armstrong said good-bye to her family at London's King's Cross station and journeyed on to the convent in Tripton to become a nun. Through the Narrow Gate is by turns a book of spiritual revelation and an intimate look at life inside the cloistered walls of the convent.--BOOK JACKET. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Muhammad Prophet for our time Karen Armstrong, 2013-06-01 Karen Armstrong adalah penulis yang telah menghasilkan karya-karya gemilang tentang berbagai tradisi agama. Dalam setiap tulisannya, dia menampakkan kepiawaiannya menampilkan kajian yang rumit menjadi bahasan yang memikat dan mudah dimengerti. Penulis yang bermukim di Inggris itu kini menampilkan biografi Nabi Muhammad, yang tentunya membawakan tafsiran yang baru dan mengejutkan yang selalu menjadi kekhasannya. Biografi Nabi Muhammad ini ditulis Karen pertama kali sebagai respons terhadap fatwa Ayatullah Khomeini terhadap Salman Rushdie. Hingga saat itu, kebanyakan literatur Barat menggambarkan Muhammad entah sebagai orang suci yang sempurna atau sebagai penipu ulung. Armstrong berdiri di tengahnya: Muhammad ditampilkannya sebagai seorang luar biasa berbakat, pemberani, dan kompleks. Diperlihatkannya pula betapa karakter dan ide-ide Nabi demikian kuat untuk mengubah sejarah secara drastis dan menarik jutaan pengikut. Dengan mahir Karen menjalinkan di dalam narasinya jejak-jejak awal sejarah panjang permusuhan Barat terhadap Islam. Ditulis dengan riset yang kuat dan berdasarkan sumber-sumber yang berimbang, penggambaran Karen tentang Nabi dengan latar kehadirannya tentu dapat pula mencerahkan pembaca dengan pemahaman baru tentang kejadian-kejadian modern di kancah politik internasional. [Mizan, Agama, nabi, Islam, Karen Amstrong, Indonesia] |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Battle for God Karen Armstrong, 2001 Britain's greatest religious historian chronicles the rise and rise of fundamentalism. One of the most potent forces bedevilling the modern world is religious extremism, and the need to understand it has never been greater. Focusing in detail on Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, Jewish fundamentalism from sixteenth century Spain onwards and Muslim fundamentalism over the last four hundred years, Armstrong examines the patterns that underlie fundamentalism. These evolve from the clash between the conservative pre-modern mind that is governed by a love of myth, and the progressive rational society that relishes change. Fundamentalists view the contemporary world with horror, rejecting its claims to truth, and a state of war now exists over the future of our culture. They are not terrorists, rather, they are innovative, existing in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity, each urging the other on to greater excess. The Battle for God is original in its thesis and in its understanding; as a history of religious ideas it is fascinating, and as an explanation of one of the most destabilizing forces at large in the world today it is extraordinary. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Great Transformation Karen Armstrong, 2009-02-24 From one of the world’s leading writers on religion and the highly acclaimed author of the bestselling A History of God, The Battle for God and The Spiral Staircase, comes a major new work: a chronicle of one of the most important intellectual revolutions in world history and its relevance to our own time. In one astonishing, short period – the ninth century BCE – the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity into the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Historians call this the Axial Age because of its central importance to humanity’s spiritual development. Now, Karen Armstrong traces the rise and development of this transformative moment in history, examining the brilliant contributions to these traditions made by such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Ezekiel. Armstrong makes clear that despite some differences of emphasis, there was remarkable consensus among these religions and philosophies: each insisted on the primacy of compassion over hatred and violence. She illuminates what this “family” resemblance reveals about the religious impulse and quest of humankind. And she goes beyond spiritual archaeology, delving into the ways in which these Axial Age beliefs can present an instructive and thought-provoking challenge to the ways we think about and practice religion today. A revelation of humankind’s early shared imperatives, yearnings and inspired solutions – as salutary as it is fascinating. Excerpt from The Great Transformation: In our global world, we can no longer afford a parochial or exclusive vision. We must learn to live and behave as though people in remote parts of the globe were as important as ourselves. The sages of the Axial Age did not create their compassionate ethic in idyllic circumstances. Each tradition developed in societies like our own that were torn apart by violence and warfare as never before; indeed, the first catalyst of religious change was usually a visceral rejection of the aggression that the sages witnessed all around them. . . . All the great traditions that were created at this time are in agreement about the supreme importance of charity and benevolence, and this tells us something important about our humanity. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: A History of God Karen Armstrong, 2011-08-10 Why does God exist? How have the three dominant monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—shaped and altered the conception of God? How have these religions influenced each other? In this stunningly intelligent book, Karen Armstrong, one of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. The epic story begins with the Jews' gradual transformation of pagan idol worship in Babylon into true monotheism—a concept previously unknown in the world. Christianity and Islam both rose on the foundation of this revolutionary idea, but these religions refashioned 'the One God' to suit the social and political needs of their followers. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, Karen Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one superbly readable volume, destined to take its place as a classic. Praise for History of God “An admirable and impressive work of synthesis that will give insight and satisfaction to thousands of lay readers.”—The Washington Post Book World “A brilliantly lucid, spendidly readable book. [Karen] Armstrong has a dazzling ability: she can take a long and complex subject and reduce it to the fundamentals, without oversimplifying.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Absorbing . . . A lode of learning.”—Time “The most fascinating and learned study of the biggest wild goose chase in history—the quest for God. Karen Armstrong is a genius.”—A.N. Wilson, author of Jesus: A Life |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Jerusalem Karen Armstrong, 2011-08-10 Venerated for millennia by three faiths, torn by irreconcilable conflict, conquered, rebuilt, and mourned for again and again, Jerusalem is a sacred city whose very sacredness has engendered terrible tragedy. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly praised A History of God, traces the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all laid claim to Jerusalem as their holy place, and how three radically different concepts of holiness have shaped and scarred the city for thousands of years. Armstrong unfolds a complex story of spiritual upheaval and political transformation--from King David's capital to an administrative outpost of the Roman Empire, from the cosmopolitan city sanctified by Christ to the spiritual center conquered and glorified by Muslims, from the gleaming prize of European Crusaders to the bullet-ridden symbol of the present-day Arab-Israeli conflict. Written with grace and clarity, the product of years of meticulous research, Jerusalem combines the pageant of history with the profundity of searching spiritual analysis. Like Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Jerusalem is a book for the ages. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The case for God. Karen Armstrong, 2009 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 21st century, 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 think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors? Answering these questions, 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 an 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 readers that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Norton Anthology of World Religions Biale, David, Miles, Jack, 2015-02-19 This magisterial Norton Anthology, edited by world-renowned scholars, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world 's major religions. To help readers encounter strikingly unfamiliar texts with pleasure; accessible introductions, headnotes, annotations, pronouncing glossaries, maps, illustrations and chronologies are provided. For readers of any religion or none, The Norton Anthology of World Religions opens new worlds that, as Miles writes, invite us to see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will... Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Judaism brings together over 300 texts from pre-Israelite Mesopotamia to post-Holocaust Israel and America. The volume features Jack Miles 's illuminating General Introduction - “How the West Learned to Compare Religions” - as well as David Biale 's “Israel among the Nations,” a lively primer on Jewish history and the core teachings of Judaism. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Holy War Karen Armstrong, 1988 A penetrating narrative history of the Crusades that reveals the ominous links and parallels between those medieval clashes and the violent rivalries of the Middle East today. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Muhammad Karen Armstrong, 2023-06-15 A life of the prophet Muhammad by bestselling author Karen Armstrong. 'Armstrong has a dazzling ability: she can take a long and complex subject and reduce it to its fundamentals, without over-simplifying' SUNDAY TIMES 'One of our best living writers on religion' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Not just a sympathetic book that would dispel the misconceptions and misgivings of its western readers, but also a book that is of considerable importance to Muslims' MUSLIM NEWS Most people in the West know very little about the prophet Muhammad. The acclaimed religious writer Karen Armstrong has written a biography which will give us a more accurate and profound understanding of Islam and the people who adhere to it so strongly. Muhammad also offers challenging comparisons with the two religions most closely related to it - Judaism and Christianity. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Fields of Blood Karen Armstrong, 2014-10-28 A sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence—from the New York Times bestselling author of The History of God • “Elegant and powerful.... Both erudite and accurate, dazzling in its breadth of knowledge and historical detail.” —The Washington Post In these times of rising geopolitical chaos, the need for mutual understanding between cultures has never been more urgent. Religious differences are seen as fuel for violence and warfare. In these pages, one of our greatest writers on religion, Karen Armstrong, amasses a sweeping history of humankind to explore the perceived connection between war and the world’s great creeds—and to issue a passionate defense of the peaceful nature of faith. With unprecedented scope, Armstrong looks at the whole history of each tradition—not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Religions, in their earliest days, endowed every aspect of life with meaning, and warfare became bound up with observances of the sacred. Modernity has ushered in an epoch of spectacular violence, although, as Armstrong shows, little of it can be ascribed directly to religion. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers of different faiths in our time. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Spiral Staircase Karen Armstrong, 2016-06-09 A raw, intensely personal memoir of spiritual exploration from one of the world’s great commentators on religion. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Sacred Nature Karen Armstrong, 2023-09-05 From one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, a profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature—and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life. Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change.... But Armstrong’s book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet. —The Guardian Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred. In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian of religion Karen Armstrong re-sacralizes nature for modern times. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the world’s religious traditions, she vividly describes nature’s central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature’s potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Buddha Karen Armstrong, 2008-11-03 The author of The Battle for God and other works on religion focuses her attention on the Buddha, retracing his life from prince to savior of humankind, in a philosophical portrait that offers an illuminating look at how his life and path to spiritual enlightenment spawned one of the great religions of the world. Reprint. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: God Is Not One Stephen Prothero, 2010-09-20 fascinating guide to religion and its place in the world today. In God Is Not One, bestselling author Stephen Prothero makes a fresh and provocative argument that, contrary to popular understanding, all religions are not simply ''different paths to the same God.'' Instead, he shows that the differences between the major religions are far greater than we think: they each ask different questions, tackle different problems, and aim at different goals. God Is Not One highlights the unique aspects of the world's major religions, with chapters on Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba religion, Judaism, Daoism and atheism. Lucid and compelling, God Is Not One offers a new understanding of religion for the twenty-first century. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Future of God Deepak Chopra, M.D., 2015-11-10 From the New York Times Bestselling Author. Can God be revived in a skeptical age? What would it take to give people a spiritual life more powerful than anything in the past? Deepak Chopra tackles these issues with eloquence and insight in this book. He proposes that God lies at the source of human awareness. Therefore, any person can find the God within that transforms everyday life. God is in trouble. The rise of the militant atheist movement spearheaded by Richard Dawkins signifies, to many, that the deity is an outmoded myth in the modern world. Deepak Chopra passionately disagrees, seeing the present moment as the perfect time for making spirituality what it really should be: reliable knowledge about higher reality. Outlining a path to God that turns unbelief into the first step of awakening, Deepak shows us that a crisis of faith is like the fire we must pass through on the way to power, truth, and love. “Faith must be saved for everyone’s sake,” he writes. “From faith springs a passion for the eternal, which is even stronger than love. Many of us have lost that passion or have never known it.” In any age, faith is a cry from the heart. God is the higher consciousness that responds to the cry. “By itself, faith can’t deliver God, but it does something more timely: It makes God possible.” For three decades, Deepak Chopra has inspired millions with his profound writing and teaching. With The Future of God, he invites us on a journey of the spirit, providing a practical path to understanding God and our own place in the universe. Now, is a moment of reinvigoration, he argues. Now is moment of renewal. Now is the future. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Hinduism Before Reform Brian A. Hatcher, 2020-03-10 How did Hindu reformers make the religion modern? Brian Hatcher argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Exploring two nineteenth-century Hindu movements, the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday, he challenges the notion of religious reform. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Stealing My Religion Elizabeth M. Bucar, Liz Bucar, 2022-09-13 “Bucar’s sharp insights, shot through with humor and self-awareness, are exactly what we need the next time we reach over to borrow from someone else’s religion for our own therapeutic, political, or educational needs.” —Gene Demby, cohost and correspondent for NPR’s Code Switch “So finely written, so intelligent and fair, and laced with such surprising discoveries that it deserves a reader’s full attention...As the act of walking a religious pilgrimage does invite greater self-awareness...Stealing My Religion is now an essential part of that worthy endeavor.” —Kurt Caswell, Los Angeles Review of Books “Lively in style and backed by solid, unobtrusive scholarship.” —Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement “With interpretive subtlety and ethical vision, Liz Bucar explores the moral risk of intercultural theft. Stealing My Religion is a powerful intervention by a leading scholar of religion into the illiberal results of everyday religious exploitation. Highly recommended. —Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion Liz Bucar unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, economic, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from another’s religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Bucar sees religion as an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because faiths overlap and imitate each other and because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. Indeed, if we are to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are. Stealing My Religion guides us through three revealing case studies—the hijab as a feminist signal of Muslim allyship, a study abroad “pilgrimage” on the Camino de Santiago, and the commodification of yoga in the West. We see why the Vatican can’t grant Rihanna permission to dress up as the pope, yet it’s still okay to roll out our yoga mats. Reflecting on her own missteps, Bucar comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isn’t to borrow less but to borrow more—to become deeply invested in learning the roots and diverse meanings of our enthusiasms. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Man Seeks God Eric Weiner, 2011-09-01 Bestselling author of Geography of Bliss returns with this funny, illuminating chronicle of a globe-spanning spiritual quest to find a faith that fits. When a health scare puts him in the hospital, Eric Weiner-an agnostic by default-finds himself tangling with an unexpected question, posed to him by a well-meaning nurse. Have you found your God yet? The thought of it nags him, and prods him-and ultimately launches him on a far-flung journey to do just that. Weiner, a longtime spiritual voyeur and inveterate traveler, realizes that while he has been privy to a wide range of religious practices, he's never seriously considered these concepts in his own life. Face to face with his own mortality, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to his young daughter, he decides to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come, if he can, to a personal understanding of the divine. The journey that results is rich in insight, humor, and heart. Willing to do anything to better understand faith, and to find the god or gods that speak to him, he travels to Nepal, where he meditates with Tibetan lamas and a guy named Wayne. He sojourns to Turkey, where he whirls (not so well, as it turns out) with Sufi dervishes. He heads to China, where he attempts to unblock his chi; to Israel, where he studies Kabbalah, sans Madonna; and to Las Vegas, where he has a close encounter with Raelians (followers of the world's largest UFO-based religion). At each stop along the way, Weiner tackles our most pressing spiritual questions: Where do we come from? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives? Where do all the missing socks go? With his trademark wit and warmth, he leaves no stone unturned. At a time when more Americans than ever are choosing a new faith, and when spiritual questions loom large in the modern age, Man Seeks God presents a perspective on religion that is sure to delight, inspire, and entertain. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Changing Homelands Neeti Nair, 2011-04 Neeti Nair’s account of the partition in the Punjab rejects the idea that essential differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities made political settlement impossible. Far from being an inevitable solution, partition—though advocated by some powerful Hindus—was a stunning surprise to the majority of Hindus in the region. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: A Short History of Myth (Myths series) Karen Armstrong, 2010-10-29 What are myths? How have they evolved? And why do we still so desperately need them? A history of myth is a history of humanity, Karen Armstrong argues in this insightful and eloquent book: our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, link us to our ancestors and each other. This is a brilliant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense–from Palaeolithic times to the “Great Western Transformation” of the last 500 years–and why we dismiss it only at our peril. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, Michael K. Jerryson, 2015-11 Violence has always played a part in the religious imagination, from symbols and myths to legendary battles, from colossal wars to the theater of terrorism. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence surveys intersections between religion and violence throughout history and around the world. The forty original essays in this volume include overviews of major religious traditions, showing how violence is justified within the literary and theological foundations of the tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and how social acts of violence and warfare have been justified by religious ideas. The essays also examine patterns and themes relating to religious violence, such as sacrifice and martyrdom, which are explored in cross-disciplinary or regional analyses; and offer major analytic approaches, from literary to social scientific studies. The contributors to this volume--innovative thinkers who are forging new directions in theory and analysis related to religion and violence--provide novel insights into this important field of studies. By mapping out the whole field of religion and violence, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence will prove an authoritative source for students and scholars for years to come. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Did God Really Command Genocide? Paul Copan, Matt Flannagan, 2014-11-11 A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. Even Christians have a hard time stomaching such a thought, and many avoid reading those difficult Old Testament passages that make us squeamish. Instead, we quickly jump to the enemy-loving, forgiving Jesus of the New Testament. And yet, the question doesn't go away. Did God really command genocide? Is the command to utterly destroy morally unjustifiable? Is it literal? Are the issues more complex and nuanced than we realize? In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages. Pastors, youth pastors, campus ministers, apologetics readers, and laypeople will find that this book both enlightens and equips them for serious discussion of troubling spiritual questions. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Why Evolution is True Jerry A. Coyne, 2009 Weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, palaeontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy and development that demonstrate the processes first proposed by Darwin and to present them in a crisp, lucid, account accessible to a wide audience. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Pantheologies Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 2018-11-06 Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Brahman and Dao Ithamar Theodor, Zhihua Yao, 2013-11-07 Brahman and Dao: Comparative Studies of Indian and Chinese Philosophy and Religion is a pioneering volume highlighting possible bridges between Indian and Chinese cultures and complex systems of thought, and it includes 17 chapters on various Indo-Chinese comparative topics. It looks into four such themes: 1) metaphysics and soteriology, 2) ethics, 3) body, health and spirituality, and 4) language and culture. |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Gospel According to Woman Karen Armstrong, 1996 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The Bible , 1607 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Reason and Reverence William R. Murry, 2007 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Muhammad Karen Armstrong, 2013-08-13 New York Times–Bestselling Author: This biography of the man who inspired the world’s fastest-growing religion “paints a portrait of a very human prophet” (The Wall Street Journal). Muhammad presents a fascinating portrait of the founder of a religion that continues to change the course of world history. Muhammad’s story is more relevant than ever, because it offers crucial insight into the true origins of an increasingly radicalized Islam. Countering those who dismiss Islam as fanatical and violent, Karen Armstrong, author of Islam and A History of God, offers a clear, accessible, and balanced portrait of the central figure of one of the world’s great religions. “A good glimpse of how the vast majority of the world’s Muslims understand their prophet.” —The New York Times “Respectful, knowledgeable, and, above all, readable. It succeeds because [Armstrong] brings Muhammad to life as a fully rounded human being.” —The Economist |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century Karen Armstrong, 1991 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Touching the Elephant Nancy Thompson, 2019-07-31 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: The First Christian Karen Armstrong, 1983 |
| karen armstrong hinduism: Religious Literacy Stephen Prothero, 2009-10-13 The United States is one of the most religious places on earth, but it is also a nation of shocking religious illiteracy. Only 10 percent of American teenagers can name all five major world religions and 15 percent cannot name any. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible holds the answers to all or most of life's basic questions, yet only half of American adults can name even one of the four gospels and most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible. Despite this lack of basic knowledge, politicians and pundits continue to root public policy arguments in religious rhetoric whose meanings are missed—or misinterpreted—by the vast majority of Americans. We have a major civic problem on our hands, says religion scholar Stephen Prothero. He makes the provocative case that to remedy this problem, we should return to teaching religion in the public schools. Alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic, religion ought to become the Fourth R of American education. Many believe that America's descent into religious illiteracy was the doing of activist judges and secularists hell-bent on banishing religion from the public square. Prothero reveals that this is a profound misunderstanding. In one of the great ironies of American religious history, Prothero writes, it was the nation's most fervent people of faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy. Just how that happened is one of the stories this book has to tell. Prothero avoids the trap of religious relativism by addressing both the core tenets of the world's major religions and the real differences among them. Complete with a dictionary of the key beliefs, characters, and stories of Christianity, Islam, and other religions, Religious Literacy reveals what every American needs to know in order to confront the domestic and foreign challenges facing this country today. |
如何看美剧无耻之徒里的Karen？ - 知乎
Monica和Karen就像浪子心头那一块最烫的铁，永远烙在心上，有不甘有不舍，有依赖，对于他们来说她们给他们注入了新的灵魂。 lipKaren问题的常见FAQ. Q: Karen这种人，lip为啥爱的死 …
如何评价《无耻之徒》（Shameless）中 Lip 这一角色？ - 知乎
后来Karen走了，又回来，他还是想都没想Mandy就又和Karen好上了，后来Mandy把Karen撞傻了，我想他也不会原谅Mandy的。 第二任女友Mandy。 Mandy真的好好好好，之前我一直希 …
为何美国伊利诺伊大学香槟分校在国内名声这么高？ - 知乎
Karen Liu出生于加利福尼亚，但在上海长大。她选择伊利诺伊大学香槟分校的原因之一是因为它不在城市中。 图片来源：Dusty Rhodes / NPR伊利诺伊州. 资料来源： https:// …
为什么全世界只有中国才有熊猫？ - 知乎
因为很复杂的自然地理原因了，有些动物只在特定区域生活，熊猫的栖息地恰好全在中国内，所以只有中国有熊猫。
家里的WiFi最近很不稳定，信号满格但是网络却很差，想知道是什 …
知乎，中文互联网高质量的问答社区和创作者聚集的原创内容平台，于 2011 年 1 月正式上线，以「让人们更好的分享知识、经验和见解，找到自己的解答」为品牌使命。知乎凭借认真、专业 …
有哪些好看的CNN模型画法？ - 知乎
个人理解和简单总结. 根据上面一些经典的CNN结构图和大神们paper里面的CNN模型图，可以看出大家还是在参考经典CNN结构的基础上作出自己的一些变化：例如Cold Start paper模仿ZF …
英语冒号后面首字母需要大写吗？ - 知乎
Karen had very peculiar eating habits: She refused to eat anything green. She also had to drink carbonated water with every meal. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises begins with an abrupt …
果糖、葡萄糖、蔗糖和淀粉在体内代谢有何不同，为什么果糖相对 …
Carol F Kirkpatrick 1 , Julie P Bolick 2 , Penny M Kris-Etherton 3 , Geeta Sikand 4 , Karen E Aspry 5 , Daniel E Soffer 6 , Kaye-Eileen Willard 7 , Kevin C Maki 8.Review of current evidence and …
如何看美剧无耻之徒里的Karen？ - 知乎
Monica和Karen就像浪子心头那一块最烫的铁，永远烙在心上，有不甘有不舍，有依赖，对于他们来说她们给他们注入了新的灵魂。 lipKaren问题的常见FAQ. Q: Karen这种人，lip为啥爱的死 …
如何评价《无耻之徒》（Shameless）中 Lip 这一角色？ - 知乎
后来Karen走了，又回来，他还是想都没想Mandy就又和Karen好上了，后来Mandy把Karen撞傻了，我想他也不会原谅Mandy的。 第二任女友Mandy。 Mandy真的好好好好，之前我一直希 …
为何美国伊利诺伊大学香槟分校在国内名声这么高？ - 知乎
Karen Liu出生于加利福尼亚，但在上海长大。她选择伊利诺伊大学香槟分校的原因之一是因为它不在城市中。 图片来源：Dusty Rhodes / NPR伊利诺伊州. 资料来源： https:// …
为什么全世界只有中国才有熊猫？ - 知乎
因为很复杂的自然地理原因了，有些动物只在特定区域生活，熊猫的栖息地恰好全在中国内，所以只有中国有熊猫。
家里的WiFi最近很不稳定，信号满格但是网络却很差，想知道是什 …
知乎，中文互联网高质量的问答社区和创作者聚集的原创内容平台，于 2011 年 1 月正式上线，以「让人们更好的分享知识、经验和见解，找到自己的解答」为品牌使命。知乎凭借认真、专业 …
有哪些好看的CNN模型画法？ - 知乎
个人理解和简单总结. 根据上面一些经典的CNN结构图和大神们paper里面的CNN模型图，可以看出大家还是在参考经典CNN结构的基础上作出自己的一些变化：例如Cold Start paper模仿ZF …
英语冒号后面首字母需要大写吗？ - 知乎
Karen had very peculiar eating habits: She refused to eat anything green. She also had to drink carbonated water with every meal. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises begins with an abrupt …
果糖、葡萄糖、蔗糖和淀粉在体内代谢有何不同，为什么果糖相对 …
Carol F Kirkpatrick 1 , Julie P Bolick 2 , Penny M Kris-Etherton 3 , Geeta Sikand 4 , Karen E Aspry 5 , Daniel E Soffer 6 , Kaye-Eileen Willard 7 , Kevin C Maki 8.Review of current evidence and …
