Karen Armstrong

Clashes and vitriol only make it worse. I think what we must learn to do is to read the imagery. read more

Clashes and vitriol only make it worse. I think what we must learn to do is to read the imagery. We need to analyze and understand the subtext.

Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal read more

Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious read more

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, read more

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from read more

Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.