No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. The author's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon...

Religious historian 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. She explores how "as the pragmatic scientific ethos of modernity took hold, scripture was read for the information...

This brilliant, readable synthesis of the history of mythology and the function it serves to humanity is the launch title of the groundbreaking publishing event, The Myths. Human beings have always been mythmakers. So begins Karen Armstrong's concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters, right up to the...

A history of Jerusalem and its three religions, examining what the holy city means to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and the implications of Jerusalem's sanctity in each tradition.

Examines how fundamentalism has influenced all of the world's major religions, discussing how it arose as a response to the spiritual crisis of the modern world and focusing on three fundamentalist movements, Protestant fundamentalism in America, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran.

Armstrong begins this spellbinding story of her spiritual journey with her departure in 1969 from the Roman Catholic convent she had entered seven years before--hoping, but failing, to find God. Powerfully engaging, often heartbreaking, but lit with bursts of humor, "The Spiral Staircase" is an extraordinary history of self.

"From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence. For the first time in American history, religious self-identification is on the decline. Some have cited a perception that began to grow after Sept 11: That faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance and divisiveness--something bad for society. But how accurate is that view? And does it apply equally to all faiths?...

"A profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature-and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life"--

"A stirring account of the life of Paul, who brought Christianity to the Jews, by the most popular writer on religion in the English-speaking world, Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God, which has been translated into thirty languages"--

"The power of Genesis lies in its stories, especially those of the creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. Armstrong traces the grand design of Genesis and its great themes, examines its stories in fascinating detail, and shows why and how they work so well to illustrate the human quest for meaning." "We discover how these ancient tales illuminate our most profound and intractable problems: our struggle with evil, with...