God & Armstrong
Karen Armstrong is a highly respected author whose spiritual journey has taken her from life as a Catholic nun to an exploration of all the major faith traditions. Her commitment to understanding the three Abrahamic faiths more thoroughly has led her to become a spokesperson for peace. In her recent book, The Case for God, Armstrong does not make a case for the God that we might easily recognize. Through a meticulous examination of the history of faith, the author argues that the God of Antiquity who we identify as the Hebrew God of scripture is a far more transcendent God than the idolatrous god that the Western Enlightenment first created and that subsequent generations of scholars have sought to confine , define, and ultimately disprove. We would do well to abandon the latter god in a search of a richer experience of God.
Lacking the degree of scholarship and praxis that some of the theologians she references demand, I found myself struggling to fully absorb the nuances. Nevertheless, I have already recommended it to a colleague. The deficit is mine, not the author’s. Her analysis of the new atheism and of the fundamentalism of present-day Judaism, Christianity & Islam is astute and relevant in light of the ‘hardening of hearts’ that we see on all sides of these perspectives. Her wisdom is a great gift to the international debate on religion and peace.