Armstrong, Karen

▪ 1997

      Though once a refugee from religion, in 1996 author Karen Armstrong completed In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis, worked closely with a major television series on the book of Genesis: "Genesis: A Living Conversation," and completed her most ambitious project to date: Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, a history of Jerusalem from the Bronze Age to the present. Armstrong, one of the leading commentators on religion in Britain and once a practicing Roman Catholic, described herself as a "freelance monotheist."

      Armstrong was born on Nov. 14, 1944, in Worcestershire, Eng. At 17 she entered a Catholic convent. Though she had "pictured the religious life as a series of philosophical conversations sandwiched between prayerful ecstasies," she was rudely awakened. She entered the convent just as the Second Vatican Council was getting under way, long before its reforms were introduced into Catholic institutions. Armstrong found herself searching for God in the midst of the severe and outdated Victorian subculture of her convent. After seven years of tortured experience, she emerged nonreligious and recounted her journey in the autobiographical Through the Narrow Gate (1981). She graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in literature and then taught modern literature at the University of London before serving as the head of the English department at a girls' school. By 1982 she had become a freelance writer and broadcaster. This new vocation gradually led her back to the subject of religion. In 1983 she wrote and presented a six-part documentary TV series on the life and work of the Apostle Paul. Much of the background work for the series was done on-site in the Middle East, where Armstrong gained a fresh appreciation for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. She then went on to other television series, including "Varieties of Religious Experience" (1984) and "Tongues of Fire" (1985). A teacher at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and the Training of Rabbis and Teachers, she was also an honorary member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists.

      Armstrong's work A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (1993) was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. Her other works include Beginning the World (1983), The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West (1986), Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (rev. ed., 1991), Muhammad (1991), The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (1991), and The End of Silence: Women and the Priesthood (1993).

      (TODD M. JOHNSON)

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