Bøger af Karen Armstrong

Et forsvar for den fortryllede natur I størstedelen af menneskehedens historie er naturen blevet opfattet som hellig og vores Gud eller guder blevet betragtet som allestedsnærværende. Da den vestlige verdens naturvidenskab og filosofi i det 17. århundrede begyndte at adskille Gud fra naturen, skete der ikke kun et brud med tusind års akkumuleret viden og erfaring – det blev også roden til den udbytning af naturen og den usunde individualisering, som nu viser sig fatal.Karen Armstrong er en af verdens førende religionsformidlere. Hun argumenterer i sin bog for, at det ikke er nok at ændre adfærd for at dæmme op for den truende klimakatastrofe. Vi har brug for at reparere det grundlæggende bånd mellem verden og menneske. Hun er overbevist om, at religion og spiritualitet kan komme os til hjælp – den kunstige adskillelse kan heles. Naturen skal genfortrylles, så vi lærer at omgås den med ærefrygt og respekt frem for at betragte dens ressourcer som en evig kilde til vores forbrug og velstand.Hvert af bogens ti kapitler præsenterer et tema, der står centralt i en af verdens store religioner: fra taknemmelighed og medfølelse til offer og ikkevold. Hvert kapitel afsluttes af praktiske råd til et nyt mindset om forholdet mellem natur og det hellige."Naturens hellige kraft" er en bog om ”dybdeøkologi” – om de dybeste bånd mellem menneske og natur. Den er en inspirerende og indtrængende appel til dem, der ved, at det både kræver nye handlemåder og anderledes tænkning at genoprette klodens tilstand. Karen Armstrong, født 1944, er en engelsk forfatter og religionsformidler. Hun var katolsk nonne i syv år, men forlod sin klosterorden i 1969 for at studere engelsk ved universitetet i Oxford. Hun har gennem sit omfattende og prisbelønnede forfatterskab fået et indgående kendskab til verdensreligionerne og beskriver sig selv som freelancemonoteist. På dansk er tidligere udkommet bl.a. Jerusalem og Muhammed. En biografi.

The idea of a single devine being - God, Yahweh, Allah - has existed for over 4,000 years. A controversial, extraordinary story of worship and war, A History of God confronts the most fundamental fact - or fiction - of our lives.

Now available in paperback: The Great Transformation is nothing less than a global account of the time when religion was born. 'A remarkable history... fascinating and highly readable... profoundly relevant.' Julie Wheelwright, Independent

A life of the prophet Muhammad by bestselling religious writer Karen Armstrong.

One of the world's foremost commentators on religious affairs on the history (and destiny) of the world's most misunderstood religion.

'A rich and subtle exploration of the sacredness of nature, filled with a timeless wisdom and deep humanity' Guardian In this hugely powerful book, Karen Armstrong argues that it isn't enough to change our behaviour to avert environmental catastrophe - we must rekindle our spiritual bond with the natural world. From gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence, Armstrong draws themes from the world's religious traditions to offer practical steps to reconnect you with nature.Speaking to anyone interested in our relationship with nature, worried about environmental destruction, or searching for new actions to save our planet, Sacred Nature will uncover the most profound connections between humans and the natural world.'A lamentation in the key of Greta Thunberg, with undertones of Carl Jung' Wall Street Journal'Warm and witty... a challenge to think differently in the face of climate change' Tablet'Karen Armstrong is one of the handful of wise and supremely commentators on religion' Alain de Botton

Is humanity on the brink of destroying itself? This book intends to disprove the link between religion and bloodshed. It deals with ancient religious ideas and movements that have promoted peace and reconciliation across millennia of civilization.

Myteserien:Med udgivelsen af Mytens historie indledes et af de største internationale udgivelsesprojekter nogensinde. Med 38 forlag fra hele verden som udgivere samler Myteserien nogle af verdens fineste forfattere der hver især genfortæller en myte efter eget valg. Forfatterne omfatter foreløbig bl.a. Chinua Achebe Karen Armstrong Margaret Atwood A.S. Byatt David Grossman Viktor Pelevin Donna Tart Su Tong og Jeanette Winterson.Mytens historie:Myter er universelle og tidløse historier som afspejler og former vores liv - de udforsker vores lyster vores frygt vores længsler. Fortællinger som husker os på hvad det vil sige at være menneske. Mytens historie er menneskehedens historie; vores historier og vores forskellige trosformer vores nysgerrighed og vores forsøg på at forstå verden forbinder os med vores forfædre og hinanden. Myterne hjælper os med at skabe mening.Karen Armstrongs indsigtsfulde introduktion til myternes univers fører læseren fra ældre stenalder og jægerkulturens myter helt frem til de sidste 500 års "store vestlige transformation" og videnskabens miskreditering af myterne. Det er en bog om myterne i bredest tænkelige forstand og viser hvorfor vi stadig har så desperat brug for dem.Karen Armstrong har udgivet talrige bøger som er oversat til mere end 30 sprog bl.a. "Gud - i jødedom kristendom og islam og Jerusalem: tro historie politik". Senest er udkommet "Islam: A Short History og Buddha" der blev en international bestseller.

St. Paul is known throughout the world as the first Christian writer, authoring fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. But as Karen Armstrong demonstrates in St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate, he also exerted a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the world than any other figure in history. It was Paul who established the first Christian churches in Europe and Asia in the first century, Paul who transformed a minor sect into the largest religion produced by Western civilization, and Paul who advanced the revolutionary idea that Christ could serve as a model for the possibility of transcendence. While we know little about some aspects of the life of St. Paul--his upbringing, the details of his death--his dramatic vision of God on the road to Damascus is one of the most powerful stories in the history of Christianity, and the life that followed forever changed the course of history.

RAPED, ABUSED, MOLESTED LEFT TO FIGURE OUT LIFE ON HER OWN.. Unwanted by a prostitute mother, inadequately raised by a schizophrenic aunt with multiple personalities just to name a few of the many incidents that left her on the edge of death throughout her entire upbringing. ALCOHOLIC, A YOUNG MESSY GIRL is what emerges from the pages of Broken For You. BROKEN FOR YOU is a raw look at one woman's journey into finding and remembering her beginning. Broken is a real story for real women, written with an uncommon passion, which can only be found in somebody who is brave enough to tell her story. A SURVIVOR, A WOMAN WHO DELIVERS A MESSAGE FROM HER MESS. Her story is a moving personal history of redemption written both to give thanks to God and to inspire others. Broken For you is the beginning of a story that could not be told in one book. BROKEN FOR YOU is the first of three incredible books that will blow your mind.

"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." --Publisher's website.

Un extraordinario alegato contra los prejuicios hacia una religión que practican mil doscientos millones de personas en todo el mundo.La figura de Mahoma (570-632) ha suscitado siempre inacabables controversias en el mundo occidental. Karen Armstrong comienza su libro con un documentado retrato de la situación en que se encontraban las tribus beduinas en la Arabia del siglo VI. En este ambiente, politeísta y desunido políticamente, Mahoma, vivió durante el mes de Ramadán de 610 una experiencia mística que cambió el curso de la historia: el comienzo de las revelaciones que pronto fructificarían en el Corán. La autora narra los inicios de la nueva religión, el islam, y las disputas teológicas y políticas que desgarraron la vida de numerosas familias de La Meca o de Medina. Mahoma se perfila en estas páginas como un hombre complejo, apasionado, frágil, dotado para la política y fiel a lo que entendía como una misión personal y trascendente.

La historia del libro más importante de todos los tiempos contada por Karen Armstrong, la mayor experta en religiones del mundo. La Biblia es el libro más famoso del mundo. Traducido a más de dos mil idiomas, se calcula que ha vendido más de seis mil millones de ejemplares solo en los últimos dos siglos. En esta excepcio nal crónica, Karen Armstrong sigue la creación de la Biblia para revelar un texto complejo y contradictorio, escrito por docenas de personas a lo largo de cientos de años. Armstrong comienza su análisis por los libros más antiguos de la Biblia hebrea, en los que Dios aparecía indistintamente como «Yahvé» y «Elohim», para seguir con el desarrollo del Antiguo y del Nuevo Testamen to y sacar a relucir las distintas influencias que contribuyeron a dar forma a estos textos sagrados. Desde la práctica judía de la Midrás y el culto cristiano de Jesús hasta la influencia de las epístolas de san Pablo en la Reforma protestante y la manipulación del imaginario del Apocalipsis por el fundamentalismo cristiano, Armstrong explora el contexto en que estos sesenta y seis libros han sido interpretados y explica las necesidades sociales que buscaban satisfacer. El resultado revela una obra paradójica y desconocida, y cambiará para siempre nuestra visión de la Biblia. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION As the single work at the heart of Christianity, the world's largest organized religion, the Bible is the spiritual guide for one out of every three people in the world. It is also the world's most widely distributed book and its best-selling, with an estimated six billion copies sold in the last two hundred years. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history. Its contents have changed over the centuries, it has been transformed by translation and, through interpretation, has developed manifold meanings to various religions, denominations, and sects. In this seminal account, acclaimed historian Karen Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation, life, and afterlife of history's most powerful book. Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected into one work, and how it became accepted as Christianity's sacred text, and how its interpretation changed over time. Armstrong's history of the Bible is a brilliant, captivating book, crucial in an age of declining faith and rising fundamentalism.

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.

With a new postscriptIn 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.

From Karen Armstrong, the bestselling author of A History of God and The Spiral Staircase, comes this extraordinary investigation of a critical moment in the evolution of religious thought. In the ninth century BCE, events in four regions of the civilized world led to the rise of religious traditions that have endured to the present day-development of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Armstrong, one of our most prominent religious scholars, examines how these traditions began in response to the violence of their time. Studying figures as diverse as the Buddha and Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah, Armstrong reveals how these still enduring philosophies can help address our contemporary problems.

Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey. In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness-diagnosed only years later as epilepsy-marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.

Through the Narrow Gate is Karen Armstrong's intimate memoir of life inside a Catholic convent. With refreshing honesty and clarity, the book takes readers on a revelatory adventure that begins with Armstrong's decision in the course of her spiritual training offers a fascinating view into a shrouded religious life, and a vivid, moving account of the spiritual coming age of one of our most loved and respected interpreters of religious.

With such bestsellers as A History of God and Islam, Karen Armstrong has consistently delivered "penetrating, readable, and prescient" (The New York Times) works that have lucidly engaged a wide range of religions and religious issues. In Buddha she turns to a figure whose thought is still reverberating throughout the world 2,500 years after his death.Many know the Buddha only from seeing countless serene, iconic images. But what of the man himself and the world he lived in? What did he actually do in his roughly eighty years on earth that spawned one of the greatest religions in world history? Armstrong tackles these questions and more by examining the life and times of the Buddha in this engrossing philosophical biography. Against the tumultuous cultural background of his world, she blends history, philosophy, mythology, and biography to create a compelling and illuminating portrait of a man whose awakening continues to inspire millions.

Boka tar for seg korstogene og ser hvilke virkninger de fortsatt har i dagens Midt-Østen. Den diskuterer også hvilken rolle korstogene spiller for muslimer og jøder i dag.

Holy texts were seen as fluid and adaptable, rather than a set of binding archaic rules or a 'truth' that has to be 'believed'.Armstrong argues that only by rediscovering an open engagement with their holy texts will the world's religions be able to curtail arrogance, intolerance and violence.

'Because "God" is infinite, nobody can have the last word'What is this thing, religion, supposedly the cause of bloodshed and warring for centuries? Selected from A Case for God, Fields of Blood and The Lost Art of Scripture VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS.

Due to the level of detail, maps are best viewed on a tablet.'A History of Jerusalem should be read, not only by travellers and potential travellers in Jerusalem, but by all of us.' Stephen Tummin, Daily TelegraphJerusalem has probably cast more of a spell over the human imagination than any other city in the world.Held by believers to contain the site where Abraham offered up Isaac, the place of the crucifixion of Christ and the rock from which the prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven, Jerusalem has been celebrated and revered for centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Such is the symbolic power of this ancient city that its future status poses a major obstacle to a comprehensive regional peace in the Middle East.In this comprehensive and elegantly written work, Karen Armstrong traces the turbulent history of the city from the prehistoric era to the present day.

The beautifully quirky title of Karen Armstrong's first collection of poetry maps the final journey of a friend who is dying of cancer. These poems capture the warmth of unselfish love; of a relationship despite trying circumstances. A pact between two friends where one shares the burden vicariously as the other faces debilitating illness and inevitable death. - Peter F. Pike, Managing Editor, FreeXpresSion With unpretentious simplicity and directness, Karen Armstrong conveys the tangled emotions defiance, confusion, anger, black humour and acquiescence experienced by two friends confronting one's imminent death. These poems, unified by images of feathers and flight, convey the fragility and lightness of being mortal. They build slowly, without sentimentality, through past memories and present moments towards the inexorable moment of parting when the future must be faced alone. These poems will strike a chord with anyone who has tackled the stony stages of loss. - Janet Upcher This collection of poetry will move you and linger in you long after the vigil is over. It will bring you out from the little black box we keep ourselves tucked into. Armstrong presents the harrowing circumstances as they are with acute sensitivity. The poems are quietly terrifying as they draw us to the bright light of death. They are a potent mix of sorrow and need, an ongoing state of mourning for the poet's friend. This is a book necessary for life. Enjoy this book. It insists. - Karen Knight

"Does the face of God change? Years ago I would have said, ''No.'' Countless hymns, passage of Scripture and confessions of faith assert or imply the changelessness of God. To take issue with traditions that are centuries, if not millennia old, seemed to be daunting and misguided....But when the great professions of confidence in God harden into philosophical propositions, one is bound to ask: What difference would it make to say that God has only one face? Even if true in some sense, the fact of the matter is that features each of us would count as necessary and changeless would be a matter of considerable debate." - From the IntroductionIn 1998/99 five scholars presented lectures at Washington National Cathedral about our images of God and what difference they make. This book, and its companion videos, will allow parish study groups and individuals to consider and discuss the viewpoints of Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Jack Miles, James Cone, and Andrew Sung Park.

The mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, writes Karen Armstrong, like "the astronauts of our own day.  They broke into a new religion, blazed a new trail to God and to the depths of the self, a trail far from the beaten pilgrimage paths of Chaucer and Langland."  Mysticism is a spiritual mystery shared in some form by all faiths; it has a supernatural quality that extends beyond the given boundaries of religious creed and may be experienced by any lay person.  The thrilling intensity of a mystical experience, as represented in this volume by the writings of four mystics of the Middle Ages, can inspire other spiritual seekers with its insight into the limitless wonder of both human and divine experience. Dissatisfied by the strictures of dogma and a religion that failed to quench the human thirst for knowledge of a mystical order, these four mystics--Richard Rolle of Hampole, Walter Hilton, Dame Julian of Norwich, and the unknown author of The Cloud Of Unknowing --communicate an intense and passionate experience of faith rare in any time.  Because of their unique beliefs and spiritual strength, their knowledge and writings have proved timeless, and in this beautiful volume show contemporary seekers important new insights into the nature of divine love.