02. Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong (1944, England) is an author, feminist and writer on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. She was born into a family with Irish roots who after her birth moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham.

From 1962 to 1969, Karen Armstrong was a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. During this period she received a leave of absence from her religious order to study at St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she read English, but left the order during her course of study. After graduating, she embarked on a doctorate (still at Oxford) on Alfred, Lord Tennyson while also teaching at the University of London. However, her thesis was rejected by an external examiner and she eventually left academia without completing her doctorate. This period was marked by ill-health (Armstrong's life-long, but at that time, undiagnosed, epilepsy) and her readjustment to outside life. In 1976, she became an English teacher at a girls' school in Dulwich, but her epilepsy caused her to miss too many school days, and she was asked to leave in 1981.

Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate in 1982, which described the restricted and narrow life she experienced in the convent (and earned her the enmity of many British Catholics). In 1984 she was asked to write and present a documentary on the life of St. Paul. The research for the documentary made Armstrong look again at religion, despite having abandoned religious worship after she left the convent. She has since become a prolific and acclaimed writer on subjects touching on all of the three major monotheistic religions. In 1999, the Islamic Center of Southern California honored Armstrong for promoting understanding among faiths.