Karen Armstrong, "Homo religiosus"

In 1981, Karen Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate, a controversial account of her experience as a Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a Roman Catholic order. Armstrong had left the convent and the Church in 1972, “wearied by religion” and “worn out by years of struggle,” and then spent the intervening years pursuing a doctorate in literature and teaching at a girls’ school. Although her first book was a milestone, Armstrong has described her life’s real turning point as a series of trips she made to Jerusalem beginning in 1982. Shocked by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and also by Palestinians’ intifada, Armstrong found herself questioning just how much Westerners—herself included—understood about the lives and beliefs of Muslims living in the Middle East.

After coming to the conclusion that Westerners “were posing as a tolerant and compassionate society and yet passing judgments from a position of extreme ignorance and irrationality,” Armstrong committed herself to rectifying cross-cultural misperceptions and religious misunderstandings. She has written a number of books that explore relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World (1991); Mohammed: A Biography of the Prophet (1992); and Islam: A Short History (2000). She has also written a biography, Buddha (2001), and The Battle for God (2000), an account of the rise of fundamentalism in modernity.

The selection that follows comes from The Case for God (2009), where Armstrong responds to the writings of self-professed “New Atheists” Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (2006), Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), and Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religions Poisons Everything (2007). Armstrong makes the case that their view of religion has been shaped by the very fundamentalism they so vehemently reject. Dawkins, for example, assumes that religion rests on the belief in “a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” Today this is indeed the view of God accepted by hundreds of millions of believers, yet Armstrong argues that in earlier times, religion was understood quite differently—as mythos, a symbolic language meant to transform consciousness and ways of interacting with world. She maintains that only in recent times has mythos become mistaken for an expression of objective truth.

Armstrong, Karen. “Homo Religiosus,” The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 3-26.
Biographical information and opening quotations drawn from
http://www.islamfortoday.com/karenarmstrong.htm. Middle quotation drawn from M. M. Ali’s profile of Armstrong in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Feb. 1993, p. 38, HYPERLINK http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0293/9302038.htm

Links to Explore:

Karen Armstrong's TED profile: includes links to two TED talks given by Armstrong.

Going Beyond God: an interview with Armstrong at Salon.com.

An Evening with Karen Armstrong: A youtube video of an hour-long talk by Armstrong on "the intersection of religion and secularism in contemporary life."

Questions for Connecting:

• In "Waiting for a Jew," Jonathan Boyarin describes the sense of "wholeness" that came from living in a Jewish community in Farmingdale, New Jersey. That sense of wholeness was lost, however, when his family left Farmingdale and moved to a new town where Jewish observance seemed much less important to the other Jews they met. How would Armstrong explain the sense of wholeness that Boyarin experienced, and how would she explain the feeling of loss? In what ways might Armstrong's chapter help us understand Boyarin's inner journey after college-especially why he later comes to see the wholeness of his childhood as an "illusion"?

• Armstrong sees religion as a "matter of doing" rather than a matter of allegiance to unchanging beliefs. Re-read her chapter and carefully note the many different forms of "doing" she explores, from ritual sacrifice to yoga. In what sense might we understand premodern religion as a form of psychotherapy of the kind practiced by Martha Stout, author of "When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday"? Were religious practices possibly designed to overcome dissociated states and the pathologies they cause? Or does religion actually encourage dissociation? If the answer to this last question is yes, what might be the purpose of turning away from the here and now, at least temporarily?

Explore some more:

Search for other links using Google: