The Spiral Staircase My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong

The Spiral Staircase My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong

Title: The Spiral Staircase My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong | ISBN : 9780385721271 | eISBN : 978-0-307-42939-1 | Author: Karen Armstrong | Publisher: Anchor Books a Division of Random House, Inc. | Year: Februari 22, 2005| Pages: 259 | file: pdf , epub & mobi
The Spiral Staircase My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong

About this book

A memoir recommended for those facing disappointments and making major changes in their lives.

Karen Armstrong is the author of many books including A History of God, The Battle for God, Islam and Visions of God. She is also the author of three television documentaries. Since September 11, 2001, Armstrong has been a frequent contributor to conferences, panels, newspapers, periodicals, and media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic on the subject of Islam. She lives in London.

In this intriguing spiritual autobiography, Armstrong picks up where her 1982 memoir Through the Narrow Gate left off, with the culture shock that accompanied her departure after seven years from the Catholic convent she had joined when she was an ardent, idealistic, and immature seventeen year old. Although already enrolled at Oxford University, the author is unprepared for the feeling of living in a twilight zone. Armstrong isolates herself from others and sees a psychiatrist for three years during which she is hospitalized, given drugs, and attends therapy sessions. It is only later that she discovers that her physical and mental ailments stem from epilepsy. But the biggest shock of all comes when the examiner for Oxford rejects her doctoral thesis and she is forced to take a job teaching at a private girl's school in London.

Throughout all these changes, Armstrong laments her inability to pray and her lack of a genuine sense of God's presence in her life. But like the poet T .S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday (the poem that opens this book), she persists and eventually comes to see that her spiritual recovery is taking place at its own pace and in its own sweet ways.

Armstrong regains her poise while doing research for a television documentary on St. Paul. This spurs her interest in both Judaism and Islam. For those religions, right practice is more important than right belief. While writing Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, Armstrong comes to respect his struggle with doubt, grief, and despair. She concludes that "religion is born out of desperation, horror, and vulnerability as well as from moments of sublime thought."

Armstrong also develops a sense of compassion for her own questing. Fred Burnham, director of the Trinity Institute at Trinity Church Wall Street, tells her: "You always claim that you never had a religious experience. But I disagree. I think you are constantly living in the dimension of the sacred. You are absorbed in holiness all the time!" And so Armstrong is today still spending her days thinking and talking about God, religion, and spirituality.

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong

 

Title: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life | eISBN : 978-0-307-59563-8 | Author: Karen Armstrong | Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. | Year: 2010 | Pages: 150 | Language : English | file: pdf, epub & mobi

A Word from Karen Armstrong

The work of the Charter for Compassion and this book is born from Karen Armstrong’s commitment to provide practical and actionable ideas that can indeed transform our world. Armstrong offers these words of advice to reading groups:
 
I suggest that at the end of each session, each person resolves to introduce one regular practice into his or her life. This resolution should, for example, be “realistic.” It has to be something that you can feasibly include in your daily routine; it should be challenging, but not so demanding that you give it up after a few days; it is no good saying, for example, “I am never going to say another unkind word to anybody in my life ever again,” because this just isn’t going to happen. It should be something really concrete: “I am going to go out of my way to perform one act of kindness each day to somebody (make a list of candidates!) who really annoys me.”
 
The resolution should also be practical. It shouldn’t be something vague, such as “I am going to open my heart to the whole world.” That is meaningless unless it becomes a concrete reality in your life.
 
Be creative and inventive; there is no need to stick slavishly to these suggestions: think of ways in which your actions can become a dynamic and positive force for change, not just within yourself but in the world around you. Make each resolution a regular part of your life, and by the end of the course you will have twelve new habits that should be effecting a transformation within yourself and your immediate environment.

One of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world—author of such acclaimed books as A History of God, Islam, and Buddha—now gives us an impassioned and practical 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, in this straightforward, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book, 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.

Islam A Short History by Karen Armstrong

Islam A Short History by Karen Armstrong

 

Title: Islam A Short History | ISBN: 0-8129-6618-X | Author: Karen Armstrong | Publisher: Modern Library Paperback Edition New York | Year: 2000, 2002 | Pages: 274 | Language : English | file: pdf & epub

Islam A Short History

Readers seeking a quick but thoughtful introduction to Islam will want to peruse Armstrong's latest offering. In her hallmark stylish and accessible prose, the author of A History of God takes readers from the sixth-century days of the Prophet Muhammad to the present. Armstrong writes about the revelations Muhammad received, and explains that the Qur'an earned its name (which means recitation) because most of Muhammad's followers were illiterate and learned his teachings not from reading them but hearing them proclaimed aloud. Throughout the book, Armstrong traces what she sees as Islam's emphasis on right living (? la
 Judaism) over right belief (? la Christianity). Armstrong is at her
most passionate when discussing Islam in the modern world. She explains antagonisms between Iraqi Muslims and Syrian Muslims, and discusses the devastating consequences of modernization on the Islamic world. Unlike Europe, which modernized gradually over centuries, the Islamic world had modernity thrust upon it in an exploitative manner. The Islamic countries, Armstrong argues, have been "reduced to a dependent bloc by the European powers." Armstrong also rehearses some basics about Islamic fundamentalism in a section that will be familiar to anyone who has
read her recent study, The Battle for God. A useful time line and a
guide to the "Key Figures in the History of Islam" complete this strong, brisk survey of 1,500 years of Islamic history. 

PREFACE

The external history of a religious tradition often seems divorced from the raison d'etre of faith. The spiritual quest is an interior journey; it is a psychic rather than a political drama. It is preoccupied with liturgy, doctrine, contemplative disciplines and an exploration of the heart, not with the clash of current events. Religions certainly have a life outside the soul.

Their leaders have to contend with the state and affairs of the world, and often relish doing so. They fight with members of other faiths, who seem to challenge their claim to a monopoly of absolute truth; they also persecute their co-religionists for interpreting a tradition differently or for holding heterodox beliefs. Very often priests, rabbis, imams and shamans are just as consumed by worldly ambition as regular politicians. But all this is generally seen as an abuse of a sacred ideal. These power struggles are not what religion is really about, but an unworthy distraction from the life of the spirit, which is conducted far from the madding crowd, unseen, silent and unobtrusive. Indeed, in many faiths, monks and mystics lock themselves away from the world, since the clamour and strife of history is regarded as incompatible with a truly religious life.