Karen Armstrong is best known, at least in the United States, for her popular works on the history of religion (A History of God, The Great Transformation, etc.). This memoir covers her life following her reentry into the world after seven years as a young nun in a convent.

Armstrong really is a suffering soul. Her efforts to fit herself into the totalitarian regime of the convent eventually led to a breakdown. Her subsequent years of study for an academic career also came to nothing when her doctorate was unjustly denied. Part of her distress in life turned out to be caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition mistaken for attention-seeking by her callous religious superiors, and misdiagnosed as the product of a flawed childhood by psychiatrists who ought to have known better.

A crucial discovery comes halfway through the book: “I had deliberately told myself lies and stamped hard on my mind whenever it had reached out toward the truth. As a result I had warped and incapacitated my mental powers. From now on I must be scrupulous about telling the truth, especially to myself” (p. 143), she decides. This truth-telling was a lengthy process, and it would be many years before she learned to articulate her own perspective as opposed to repeating the view of others. But she does manage it, and in contrast to the repeated setbacks of her earlier life, success in television and writing then follows almost effortlessly. “The great myths show,” she later concludes, “that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray.”

I found this book to be a real page-turner, even when Armstrong was describing the minutiae of life-events, and her gradual self-discovery and self-acceptance make for a heart-warming read.

Karen Armstrong. The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. New York: Anchor (Random House), 2005. Paperback. 336 pages. ISBN 9780385721271. $14.95.

From my blog at http://true-small-caps.blogspot.com

Derek--Thanks for the review. I've heard of, but have not read, her other books. Have you? If so, what did you think?

I enjoyed The Spiral Staircase so much that I went I went out and bought her newest book, The Case for God (2009).

I've only just started it, but now that I've read her memoir, I can see where she's coming from. Her whole academic training was in literature rather than in the history of religions, so she doesn't write as a professional historian. Her approach is more impressionistic than I'm used to. She'll make broad generalizations, and she doesn't substantiate her assertions with citations from primary sources.

Anyway, it's early days, so we'll see how I get on with that one.

It sometimes seems to me that autobiography is the most sincere form of writing about religion.

Well, Derek, I'll be looking for your review.
She did an interview on "Fresh Air", a public radio program, and, from the limited amount of written material I've seen from her, yes, it struck me too that she makes broad generalizations without enough citations to make me confident in her grasp of facts. But she does appear concerned to help everyone practice more empathy and consideration, it seemed to me.

Hi, Ariel, My first impressions of the book didn't change. I put a brief notice on my blog, but really I can't recommend the book. I agree with you that she's thoroughly well-meaning, but her style of argument just isn't convincing.

Though I've not read "The Spiral Staircase," I've not been too impressed by other works by Karen Armstrong -- mostly articles I've read on the net, or interviews of her I've seen. I think you two have identified a problem, which is the sweeping generalizations she tends to make, mostly to support her universalist approach to religious issues. She can get away with this just fine in the postmodern circles in which she seems to run as one is not really expected to back one's opinions with facts.

That said, an autobiographical work doesn't pretend to be more than it is, and so I think your point about spiritual autobiographies is well-taken, Derek.

Here's a negative review of her book, The Case for God, posted on Amazon.com I've read quite a bit of that book and would tend to agree with much of what the reviewer writes:
- http://www.amazon.com/review/R...iewpnt#RXQMD71H5GQDS

It's a pity, because I think her basic point is sound: there's a lot more to human beings than modern rational thought.

Moreover, that kind of thought doesn't necessarily have to preclude premodern ways of being. Twentieth-century people who heard Mass in Latin may not have understood a single word of it, but they were experiencing the sacred in other ways.

I've heard that the biggest movement in Christianity these last few decades has not, in fact, been a move toward liberal, rational, mainline protestant denominations. Those are in fact in decline. The biggest growth has been in the ecstatic, pentecostal forms of Christianity in the Global South -- a wholly premodern form of religion.

Yes, right, but those 3rd world Christians aren't going from Modern to Pre-modern worldviews, but from Tribal (pre-pre-modern) to Pre-Modern.

I do believe there's something valuable in Pre-modern expressions of Christianity; same with Modern and Postmodern, as I've indicated on other threads. Only one must transcend all three, to some extent, to be able to identify what is essential and what is not. So long as one is still "stuck" in a worldview (and I think Karen Armstrong is decidedly postmodern), then that pretty much determines one's theological perspective.