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A nuanced exploration of the part that religion plays in real human life, drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our own dangerously polarized age.
Moving from the Paleolithic age for this, Karen Armstrong details the fantastic lengths to which humankind has gone in order to see a sacred truth that it called by many brands, 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 inside our own time, whenever a significant number of people either want nothing in connection with God or question the efficacy of beliefs. Why has God become astounding? Why is it that atheists and theists as well now think and speak about God in a manner that veers so profoundly from the thinking about our ancestors?
Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight which may have designated all her acclaimed literature, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has always changed the value of religion at both the societal and the individual level. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of real human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The duty of religion is “to help us live artistically, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It really is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual effort” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”
