Sunday, October 18, 2009

Karen Armstrong: The Case for God


I finished Karen Armstrong The Case for God last night.

Sure, she gets some things wrong, but she really has read very widely in history, religion, and science and understood what she has read. Her last two chapters kept me up until 1:30am and were enthralling.

While dismissing fundamentalism of all kinds, she totally PWNs Dawkins and co. A quite marvellous book.

Note:

I would not usually recommend a book like this to other medievalists, since she is not exactly a historian, but more than half the book is spent discussing medieval apophatic theology, eastern and western Christian, Lurianic, and Sufi, in a way I think would benefit specialists. I have read the authors she cites (and studied under John Meyendorff, the great historian of Byzantine apophaticism), and I still came away with something new.

Update: An Interesting Talk Armstrong gave at TED.

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