Oct

31

Genius

October 31, 2007 |

At least two books I’ve seen in the last two days by an author called Karen Armstrong have their titles close-captioned with the quote, “Karen Armstrong is a genius.” That sounds interesting. I’ve never read the books of this author (I’ve seen them but felt oddly repelled) and was naturally interested in finding out about this new genius…

The Wikipedia (the genius has a Wiki entry): “an author who writes on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Armstrong is a former nun, now a “freelance monotheist”. She has advanced the theory that fundamentalist religion is a response to and product of modern culture.”

Hm, a former nun. Specialises in several religions now, eh? Fundamentalist religion comes from modern culture, yes? Let’s see about the genius bit with a little help from our friendly neighbourhood, Google…the caption to the books was written by an A. N. Wilson, author of Paul: the mind of the apostle. I simply can’t be bothered to go further with that. But here’s some more…”Armstrong can simplify complex ideas, but she is never simplistic.” -The New York Times Book Review. (Link) The rest of the entries seem to be a copy-paste of Wilson’s simple four word quote.

What I will do is try to find one of the Karen Armstrong books at the library. Or maybe I’ll just get through the copies I now have of Fr. Radcliffe’s I call you friends and St. Therese’s Story of a Soul. That should be more fun. In fact, that would be genius.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Tom Heneghan on February 4, 2008 2:55 pm

    If you’re interested in Karen Armstrong, you might want to look at her latest interview on Pakistan, Islam and secularism in the Reuters religion blog FaithWorld — http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld.

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